adminRuppert, Declan Mulrey, Marius Labay, Rachel Rashoff
Director: Niels Arden Opley
Cinema: Eastgate
Type of film: Gangster
Running time: 118 minutes
Age restriction: Adults only
IT is hardly surprising that the director who gave us “The Girl with the Golden Tattoo” should return with a film that will have cinema fans in the future remembering with awe.
And equally in my own case. Set in the very heart of New York city, the “Big Apple,” where I was born in 1928, the children of parents who had, individually, been drawn to its and after.
Brilliantly
The present-day New York city was formed in the year 1898, when five contiguous boroughs of the State of New York united. They were, and are, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island and Queens. The City has a population of more than eight million.
The film presents and pursues two themes brilliantly and relentlessly:
1. Life is what happens to you while you are waiting.
2. Even the most damaged heart can be mended.
The ruthlessness of a prototypical gangster film is immediately presented to us as we find Victor (the actor Colin Farrell a Hungarian immigrant mourning the murder of his wife and young daughter by his revengeful former colleagues.
Running immediately parallel, completely unknown to each other, we are introduced to the young and beautiful French immigrant Beatrice (Naomi Rapace) whose facial beauty has been permanently marred by an unrepentant motorist’s carelessness.
Revenge
The plot of the film, taken up by the chaotic and unpredictable life of that megalopolis, places Victor in the position of the one called upon to seek and fulfil Beatrice’s revenge.
No film in memory so seductively illustrates how a city its multitudinous and complicated parts appears to have and present to its residents an agenda of its own which is ignored only at lethal risk.
New York city bears the burden that most of its people have congregated there from elsewhere; often very far off in distinctly alien lands. This film brilliantly illustrates how this leads to disillusion, ultimately rebellion and crime.
One criticism: The New York City Police Department numbers 31 000 officers. The film “Dead Man Down” shows us not a single policeman.
Online Reporter