The title of this film should be a clue this is not a
fast-paced detective thriller, but more of a character study. The film hinges entirely on the Anna
character, and who better to reflect the emotional nuances than Charlotte
Rampling.
Anna is a gentile woman too young to give up living and too
old to easily fit in to the cruel world she’s lost in. As a lost woman, her life is a mix of fact
and fantasy, with loneliness being the predominant theme. Her eyes, her
reticence, her elegant figure convey only a small part of her mystery. You find out slowly, as if by drip torture,
that she’s being crushed by traumas of her own making.
We meet her first in one of those meet and mingle affairs
held for lonely middle-aged people without partners, a scene that is at once
depressing and pitiful. In an early sequuence, the cinematographer
cuts to snap profiles of battered people looking for human companionship in a
dreary human landscape. A bull-headed
man has dandruff on his shoulders. A
skinny would-be prospect is missing more teeth than a two year old. For another man, it’s all about all-too-eager
serial sex with the presumption that Anna is there for the same reason. Lots of people, no prospects.
I can’t say whether Anna’s social encounters are more or
less depressing than today’s computerized speed dating and sex delivery
services but one of Anna’s problems is
that she outclasses just about everyone at the ‘party,’ as the group meetings
are termed by the hotel hosts. Leaving the
hotel she brushes by Detective Chief Inspector Bernie Reid, another lost and
lonely soul who has recently separated from his wife. The detective becomes
infatuated, finds in Anna’s remote personality some semblance of his own.
So far as genre goes, people are calling it ‘film noir,’ but
though dark shadows are ever present in the film style, that seems more
convenient that describing what it really is.
There is a story arc – a murder in the beginning and the detective
ferreting out the killer in the end — but the entanglements are interesting and
often excruciating. I would acknowledge
that the ‘noir’ description fits murder victim George Stone, a peach of a man
who violently forces fellatio on Anna and otherwise brutalizes her.
The story develops in a sufficiently mysterious way that
doesn’t flinch at large and small telltale signs of a woman falling apart. The
thing about Anna is that the more she falls apart the more the story comes
together. It’s all pretty clear at the end, and there’s even a little
Faulkneresque scene (A Rose for Emily)
toward the end where we get a peek into the closed off baby’s room. There are serious cracks in the walls of Anna’s
mind.
