Post Modern Detection: Broken Flowers

No detective shows for me again last night, but instead we watched 'Broken Flowers'. Its directed by Jim Jarmusch and I loved 'Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai' and bits of 'Coffee and Cigarettes'. This film got mixed reviews when it came out but I liked it. We saw it at a preview screening at the NFT but I bumped into an old university friend in the foyer which shook me up a bit and overshadowed the film somewhat. So I was glad to rewatch it last night without that distraction.

Broken Flowers is a detective film, but a very post modern detective film in that the mystery is never solved. Solving the mystery is, along with a linear narrative structure, a masculine construct and unnecessary in these post-colonnial, post-feminsist times or something like that - from what I can remember of my degree studies which was over a decade ago.

There isn't a crime in Broken Flowers, Bill Murray's character is searching for his son rather than a killer, but he is looking for clues, encouraged by his neighbour, Winston (a scene stealing Jeffrey Wright) who is more obsessed with detectives than I am! When we first meet Winston he is having computer troubles, while looking at a website that helps you to write your own detective novel and solve any crime! You can imagine that my ears pricked up at the sound of that.

Fascinated & Flummoxed

My taste in cinema is normally wildly different from my taste in television. It has often been said of me that I’m “only interested in black & white films from the Ukraine’, which, whilst a gross exaggeration, does point to the truth that I’m not one for the Hollywood Blockbuster. And as for the multiplex, it ranks just after Victoria Beckham and seafood in my list of dislikes.

I am willing to watch a thriller in the comfort of my own home but have become rather tired of spate of ‘plot twists’ where the menace was a figment of the imagination or a split personality. It was interesting Fight Club, but dull in the Machinist, annoying in Identity and downright ridiculous in Secret Window (I make no apology for spoiling the endings of those films – I’ve saved you half a days viewing there).

So it is rare that my cinema trips would be relevant to this site, but on Saturday, we went to see Zodiac. It was showing at a nearby arts cinema so we were spared the popcorn chomping masses. All of the reviews I’d read felt compelled to mention how the long the film was, so I’m not going to break with that tradition – it was a long film. But it held my attention, even though I knew the case wasn’t going to be solved (which again isn’t a spoiler – it’s based on a true story). Robert Downey Jnr was as good as ever and the boy Gyllenhaal wasn’t bad, but I came away rather taken with Mark Ruffalo or rather his character, Inspector David Toschi.

More than that though, I’ve found myself still thinking about the film and the case long after we left the cinema, which was befitting really as the film was about obsession as much as it was about a killer. This lead to much internet-searching on Monday. After reading the ever-useful Wikipedia and entering the crazy world of the IMDB messageboards, I discovered a whole site dedicated to the case, and a web of intrigue, theories and conspiracies which would give JFK’s assassination a run for its money.

Plenty of professional police and amateur sleuths have tried to unmask the Zodiac Killer but to date no one has been charged and the facts of the case are still somewhat foggy. And it is clearly going to take a better detective than me to solve this one, but I’ll definitely be watching the film again.