Dir.
Philip Kaufman, 2004, USA, 97 mins
Cast:
Ashley Judd, Samuel L Jackson, Andy Garcia
Newly promoted to homicide, tough-girl cop Jess Shepherd (Judd, Kiss the Girls) discovers men she's bedded keep turning up dead. Increasingly unable to remember where she was at the time of the murders, she begins to doubt not only her sanity, but also her innocence.
This film makes a song-and-dance about its female lead, mistakenly equating the idea of a strong woman with laddish traits. Shepherd is shown brutalising a criminal, drinking her male colleagues under various departmental tables, sleeping around and harbouring enough pent-up aggression to bring down Mike Tyson.
None of these, though, is enough to stop her succumbing to the gender stereotypes of the genre, ultimately as a woman victimised.
As far as strong-yet-vulnerable female characters go, Shepherd doesn't quite match up to Sigourney Weaver's criminal psychologist (or Holly Hunter's detective) in Copycat. Rather, Judd's role reinforces fairytale themes: single women who live alone, drink to excess, are sexually promiscuous and generally stray far from the path are asking for the Big Bad Wolf to come knocking at their doors.
Inspector Shepherd is haunted by the death of her father. A policeman himself, Shepherd Senior also harboured murderous aggression. His killing spree ended with the death of Jess's mother and his suicide, all when Jess was only six. This is offered as the root of Shepherd's mental turmoil. She buries her pain under bravado but spends the evenings drinking herself to unconsciousness.
Still one has to ask, at the point she begins to wonder if she might not be a killer after all, wouldn't it be a good idea to remain sober? This is by far the least hole in a plot which has enough red herrings to keep a fishmonger in business.
A potentially interesting twist sees Jess displaying the killer's traits, constantly toying with unlit cigarettes when a single cigarette burn is the killer's calling card. At the same time, she has enough enemies (and sexual partners) to make every male character a suspect. The final twist though, is predictable, including an often-used mobile phone sting. The fact that the killer falls for it suggests s/he is not as diabolically clever as it first appears.
The Jekyll and Hyde premise - that Shepherd might be a killer without realising it - is the most interesting facet, but ultimately it's downplayed. In the same way, while the can of worms of sexual and gender equality is opened, it's not resolved in an original or satisfactory way. For all her striving to live her own life, all Shepherd's 'individuality' comes back to kick her in the teeth, whether its men who think they have the right to sleep with her or those who belittle her in her job.
Judd's screen look plays on the strength/vulnerability contrast. She acts and dresses in quite a masculine way, with her supposed equality shown in her physicality.
But arguably the story still relies on stereotypes - Shepherd's wild sexual antics do not women's lib make, and further enforce the suggestions that her role as a strong woman is a sexual trope and turn-on more for the benefit of male viewers.
The film noir leanings of the settings (dark alleys, deserted waterfront locations, bars where no one knows anyone's name) along with parallels in plot and character beg comparisons with Se7en.
Judd's character does, at a shallow level, explore the idea of the killer behind the cop: there's the expected dialogue through prison bars with the didactic murderer, for instance. But Kaufman's film isn't as humourless or oppressive - nor as complex - as David Fincher's.
Where the film is most successful is in communicating the unease of the city and as a lonely place for individuals.
Inspector Shepherd is constantly watched - by men in bars, by her stalker boyfriend, even by her neighbour - yet despite all these eyes murders and misdemeanours still occur. The first body is discovered in a real-life murder location behind the San Francisco Giants' baseball stadium. With 40,000 people in the vicinity, no one sees anything.
Shepherd's neighbour - the old woman who watches her disapprovingly from her kitchen - is an eerie reminder of Jess' dead mother - and a very fairytale type reminder of the ills that occur when parental control is absent or ignored. This old Japanese woman is another example of unexplained tropes littered throughout the film. The film's opening credits, with its stylized cinematography, mist-covered landscapes, birds in flight, are further examples, along with the scenes of martial arts in the park and the murder weapon itself. Yet these few parts are not strong enough to suggest a whole, and they remain fleeting and insubstantial.
The real red herrings of Twisted are not so much those of the plot but in its masquerading as 'femme' noir. Ultimately this is thriller-by-numbers, with all the stock woman-living-alone shocker moments.
Twisted? This tangled film should be so lucky.
Ruth Bushi
|
