Indie Films
Indie Films
Catch ‘Red Riding,’ if you can, for a big dose of quality noir
By JOSH KATZ
Good film noir is in short supply these days, with most people preferring the old “white hat/black hat” to the existential miasma that is film noir. It is a pleasure, then, to see noir spirit so fully embodied in the British docudrama “Red Riding.”
Red Riding, first shown on British television, follows characters caught up in the Yorkshire Ripper case.
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Friday-Sunday: “The Girl on the Train.”Last week, a drama about Nazis. This week, a drama about the evils of present-day anti-Semitism.
The first thing you notice about “Red Riding” is its epic scale. Despite the film’s modest frame (it debuted on British television and cost less than $10 million), it is composed of three 90-or-so-minute segments and spans from 1974 to 1983, when the Yorkshire Ripper terrorized the English North Country.
Far from a simple procedural a la “Seven,” “Red Riding” uses its bulk to convey an atmosphere of shifting, all-encompassing evil. The Ripper is just our entrance (and the least of the film’s horrors) to a world perverted by moral rot.
The way each section of the film challenges the traditional “hero” concept reminds me of the works of James Ellroy.
The first part, set in 1974, focuses on a young reporter covering the Ripper. He’s naive, he’s idealistic, he’s wholly committed to unraveling the case. The catch is he may be fatally out of his depth.
Part two follows a seasoned police inspector picking up the pieces in 1980. He’s smart enough to realize how deadly the conspiracy surrounding the Ripper is, and it’s agonizing (in the best dramatic sense) watching his moral outrage struggle with the futility of his investigation.
And for the film’s 1983 conclusion, we shift to the dark side. Our lead is a bad cop, glimpsed in the periphery of the previous two installments, fully complicit in the Ripper mania. We watch as he tries to redeem himself.
Taken together, this “Red Riding” trilogy becomes something uncommon: a visceral treatise on morality. It’s not perfect — the second segment is so good it overshadows the rest, and part three has trouble developing its new protagonist’s character arc while resolving the story’s many loose ends — but it’s still the kind of tough-minded, morally ambiguous crime story that never seems to get made in America anymore.
You can’t see “Red Riding” in theaters. Outside Los Angeles and New York City, it does not exist. From a business standpoint, I get it; it’s five hours long, it’s relentlessly dark, and its view of England skews more Michael Caine in the original “Get Carter” than Judi Dench in “Shakespeare in Love.”
But this is quality filmmaking. Attention must be paid.
So here’s what you do: If you’ve got IFC On Demand, you can catch all three “Red Riding” installments. Order it enough times in Portland, and that will encourage IFC to screen it theatrically.
Unlike in “Red Riding,” the right decision is clear.
Josh Katz is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.