Noir

Monday

Theo Zenou

Why we need noir

Every fella has a drink of choice. Some fellas go for a whiskey neat. Others an ice-cold beer. Me, I prefer a full glass of noir. Pure, unsweetened, hardboiled noir. The stuff that nightmares are made of. This summer, as the heat scorched the lawns and melted the pavements, I went on a bender of classic noir fiction. I read, then watched, The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain’s 1934 novel about a drifter who gets a gig at a crummy roadside diner. Soon he’s falling for the boss’s wife, a pretty gal who bats her eyes at him and drives him to break the Sixth Commandment (and the Seventh too, obviously). It was adapted for the screen many times, but the best version is the 1946 one starring Lana Turner as the pretty gal and John Garfield as the drifter.

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

Life is a game of cards: Burning Angel and Other Stories, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed

From our UK edition

This compelling and unnerving collection of stories is Lawrence Osborne’s first, coming in the wake of recent critically acclaimed novels – including The Forgiven, adapted into a film – and earlier works of memoir, essays and travelogue. Born in England, currently residing in Bangkok, Osborne has earned comparisons with Graham Greene for his portraits of flawed white characters in foreign settings, and Patricia Highsmith, thanks to the menacing noir atmosphere. These nine stories, written over the past decade, do not disappoint. Osborne removes his protagonists – English or American, on the young side of middle age – from their native environments and transplants them into exotic, perilous locations.

Thursday

Bryan Appleyard

A compelling, if flawed, example of the new American noir: Red Rocket reviewed

From our UK edition

Mikey (Simon Rex) first appears striding down a road in utterly wrecked jeans and shirt. He is carrying nothing and seems to be going nowhere until he walks up the pathway to the house of the wife he abandoned and her venomously disapproving, chain-smoking mother. Sean Baker’s Red Rocket is a movie set in Texas City in Galveston County. It’s basically an oil town and almost all the action in this film takes place on the perimeter of a vast refinery. Everything is very grainy, especially the dark interiors. This is because the film is shot on 16mm film, a medium which, on the big screen, produces a lively, speckled blur. After several attempts, Mikey charms his way back into his home.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Spellbinding: Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time reviewed

From our UK edition

The premise for the unsnappily titled Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is this: a Hungarian neurosurgeon meets a fellow Hungarian neurosurgeon at a medical conference, falls in love, and gives up her shiny life and career in America to be with him in Budapest. They had agreed to meet on one of the city’s bridges. He doesn’t show. She tracks him to the hospital where he works. He says he’s never met her before. And now we are on board. Now we have to know: is he gaslighting her? Is she crazy? How is this going to play out? This is one of those films that has you in the palm of its hand right from the off.