Chinatown: Where the Villains Won

I love this film so much that I had to watched it last night! Chinatown definitely is the best neo-noir film ever. Before I continue, I will tell you a little bit about neo-noir. This is the genre was born after the age of noir between the late 30s and 1959, a genre focuses on crime and dangerous women. After noir died, neo-noir was born. It is the same like noir but more violent, more sex, and more dangerous.

Throughout the movie, director Roman Polanski, who was famous for Rosemary's Baby, really knew how to entertain his audience. I like how he introduce the entire plot along with all of the clues at the beginning of the film because we are aware of what the crime is, but the audience is able to pick up clues along the movie, as if we were in the film ourselves. At the end of movie, there is a special twist. What does it make Chinatown so special?

Source: IMDb

The Screenplay.

I must say that he is one of the greatest actors of all time. Every performance of him always brought the audience surprises. He could be a bad guy or a good guy or a complicated guy. In Chinatown, Jake Gittes was the only person who stood for law and order in the middle of corruption in California. But he was impotent at the unfixable of the powerful people who destroyed the whole system. Chinatown is a great movie in the neo noir genre after the film noir was out of time in the end of the 50s.

I agree with critics and film historians that it is a superior screenplay. The movie had its own unique way to tell a story which led the audience to every unspeakable crime and every dark secret around the scandal of the Water Department. If anyone knew about that and tried to expose it like Mr. Mulwray, they would be killed. Money was everything and people with money had the voice and the power to control things around. In the end of the movie, the bad guy won and justice failed. The story did not go fast or suspense like other neo noir films. It slowly gave the audience time to understand the details and the characters’ personalities who had secrets to hide and tried all the ways or even dared to commit crimes to those who wanted to find out the truths. That was so brilliant.

Another thing that I think this screenplay superior is that it spoke the truth about the government’s efforts to hide all the secrets of corruption that rotten to the core and if people knew about that, it would be a big shame. Later in the 20th century, we had the Vietnam War, Watergate Scandal in the U.S and the Chernobyl Disaster in Soviet Union. It was a great movie.

Femme Fatale

In the film noir genre, female characters were always dangerous and unpredictable. Phyllis Dietrichson and Evelyn Mulwray shared two things in common. One, they were both beautiful and attractive from the very first look and they used it as a weapon to seduce all the men around them to fulfill their desires. Second, they were very smart and they used their smartness to use other people to do the jobs for them. But they were completely different. Phyllis was more evil because she killed her husband for money, manipulated Neff to join her plan and finally she betrayed him for her lover. Unlike Phyllis, Evelyn was better and more sympathetic because she had been through many bad things in life like her husband was murdered, her father’s abusive and she had a daughter who was also her sister and the father was Noah Cross, her father. (So sick).

“Forget it, Jake… it’s Chinatown”

It is the famous last line of this movie. It can be understood that whatever happens in Chinatown, even the worst things, there is nothing people can change and it is just keeping moving on. The more Jake tried to investigate to find out the truth, the more tragic that others and himself would get. Destiny had been sealed and just walked away and didn't look back. Jake Getties used to be a district attorney in Chinatown but he turned to be a private detective because of his past here and his famous quote “as little as possible” referred to his role as serving justice was so minor and there was nothing he could do because the corruption was being covered by money and power. He tried to stay away from the past, left it behind but after all, it all came back to him and forced him back to where it all began at the end of the movie.