The decor: a cramped room furnished with a desk and a few chairs, with shutters on the windows and a fan on the ceiling. The characters: an impassive-looking detective and a mysterious client. Coming from the literature, this diagram has been seen many times in the cinema. Among the myriad of fictitious “privates”, Philip Marlowe is unquestionably the most famous. Created on the page by Raymond Chandler and immortalized on the big screen by Humphrey Bogart, the iconic character returns, aging but alert, as Liam Neeson in the playful Marloweby Neil Jordan.
It is specified, Marlowe is not taken from Chandler’s work, but rather from a novel by Irish author John Banville (who won the Booker Prize for The sea), compatriot and friend of the filmmaker, as the latter recently confided to us. The adaptation is by William Monahan, Oscar winner for best adapted screenplay for The Departed (Cloudy Agents), by Martin Scorsese.
In the expert hands of Neil Jordan, whose excellent mona-lisa And The Crying Game (The cry of tears) divert many codes and conventions of film noir, Marlowe does not take long to transcend the simple notion of pastiche.
Take the detective’s new client, Clare (Diane Kruger), a young married woman eager to find her vanished lover, a certain Nico (Quebecer François Arnaud). Is she the proverbial femme fatale, or not? Are his motives noble, or evil? The end, enjoyable, and which Jordan has changed from the novel and the screenplay, answers these questions by illuminating the character in a new light, and above all by confronting the cinephile with his moral a priori.
Seemingly simple, as it should be, the case to be solved turns out to be, as it should be, take two, inextricable. Again, however, the narrative twists and turns are made to smirk.
The cinema in the background
The backdrop also adds to the general interest, since the dearly departed, who reappears at the end like Harry Lime in The Third Man (The third man), is a movie props man. Far from being, yes, incidental, this context allows Jordan to formulate an acerbic criticism of this cinematographic industry which celebrated him, forgot him, and so on (this film, perhaps destined to please the filmmaker’s admirers above all, is more personal than you might think).
In this regard, the by turns luxurious and sordid Los Angeles of 1939 has been recreated in Spain, and nothing can be seen there. The production worked with relatively little means, but we don’t feel it at all thanks to the artistic direction of John Beard (Brazil) and the photography director of Xavi Giménez (The Machinist), both fabulous.
And the staging? The director’s visual inventiveness and ability to think “outside the box” of The Company of Wolves (The company of wolves), Interview with the Vampire (Interview with a Vampire), The Butcher Boy (the butcher boy) And Breakfast on Pluto no longer need to be demonstrated. For example, rather than offering a twilight vision in tune with the 60-year-old protagonist, Jordan floods the frame with light.
The waters in which the action bathes are no less troubled.
For a flirt
Thus, the more the corpses pile up, the more one thinks of this passage from the novel. The big sleep, the first of the series featuring the character: “The dead are heavier than the broken hearts. »
Exactly, broken hearts, this film hardly counts. On this subject, and still on the subject of the imposed figures of blackness, the unavoidable relationship of seduction that is established between the private and his (possibly lethal) client is here an amusing, and sometimes surprisingly moving, one-way flirtation , Marlowe establishing from the outset that he considers himself too old for Clare’s advances.
As Velma, a predecessor of Clare, tells Marlowe in the novel Farewell, my pretty “Most men are just pigs. Besides, between us, the world we live in is rather unsavory. »
But here, if Marlowe, the film, does not contradict the second assertion, it recalls on the other hand that Marlowe, the character, is not like most men. There lies a good part of its timeless charm.