COUNTRY United states of America
YEAR 1974
GENRE
CATEGORY Film performance
Jack Nicholson as the cynical private eye, Faye Dunaway as the femme fatale, John Huston as the main villain, power struggle over water in Los Angeles as the Hitchcockian MacGuffin, and awesome twists and turns are the greatest strengths of Robert Towne’s brilliant Oscar-winning screenplay, making Polanski’s retro-noir Chinatown a true masterpiece. In the space of two hours, Towne in the script and Polanski in front of the camera play out a tangled game of intrigue and twisted family relationships that takes us by surprise several times. Similar to the protagonist, we create a map of the tangled relationships that helps us navigate the convoluted journey to find the killer, but that also puts wrong assumptions in our heads. Similarly, the film continually turns the viewer’s attention to the titular Chinatown, a metaphor for the protagonist’s state of mind and ambiguous past.
