Chinatown Film Review

by John Ryall

With the box office receipts still flowing in, the nostalgia wave shows no signs of ebbing.

The latest of this type to come to Wellington is Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Set in Los Angeles in the later 1930s, it traces the story of JJ. Gittes, a former cop from Chinatown, now engaged in matrimonial private eye work.

Gittes is hired to tail the Los Angeles water commissioner, who is suspected by his wife of being unfaithful. But the commissioner is soon victim of a highly unlikely accident — dead of a fall into a water reservoir drain, his lungs full of salt water.

The story, in the best tradition of the detective yarns of the time, goes round in circles — every lime the mystery seems to be solved, a new complication arises to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

And yet, what is Polanski trying to say? His detective story hinges on the illegal use of the city's water supply by the local big-shots during a drought. It touches on the influence that wealth can exert over local government decisions and ordinary peoples' lives, and the powerlessness of the individual against the combined forces of wealthy individuals and their ally — the state.

Chinatown becomes a metaphor for the impenetrable nature of that morass into which its private detective hero finds himself sinking. Chinatown, where the hero once found himself stationed while on the police force, and where he became involved in some obscure disaster, is, as he says, a place where you can't understand what's happening.

Nicholson's J.J. Gittes, for all his cleverness and professional skill, gen in over his head and finds that in seeking answers to a simple detective problem he is plumbing the basic make-up of American society, with its classes of powerful and powerless.

But Gittes is prevented by Polanski from finding our any more about the functioning of American society. The attempts by millionaire rancher Noah Cross (John Huston) to defraud people of their land through his control of essential water supplies are not expanded on, and instead the film lurches into a sub-plot around the incestuous relationship between Cross and his daughter (Faye Dunnaway).

Perhaps Polanski is too scared of shaking his audience out of their nostalgic world of unreality ('The Golden Years of Yesterday') and confronting them with the harsh reality of the United States in the '30s. After all, a good director must think of his box office.