'Blackmail Wire', 1970s cinema relives with Gus Van Sant
In cinemas, the new feature film by the director of 'Elephant' and 'Paranoid Park'. Hosoda's "Scarlet" is also among the new releases
A film that seems to have come straight out of the New Hollywood vein of the 1970s, 'Dead Man's Wire', one of the weekend's most important new releases in theatres, is a product that explicitly looks back to one of the most significant moments in the history of star-studded cinema.
Gus Van Sant, born in 1953, returned behind the camera to make a feature film seven years after his previous, mediocre film 'Don't Worry', and he did so by filming a news event that took place in 1977 and using stylistic choices typical of that period.
The story stars Tony Kiritsis, a 40-year-old man exasperated by a financial dispute, who breaks into the offices of the Meridian Mortgage Company, determined to get justice in his own way. But this is no simple kidnapping, Tony takes the son of the company's powerful chairman hostage: he holds a sawed-off shotgun to his head with the trigger connected by a thin wire to a contraption wrapped around his neck. If anyone tries to disarm it, the rifle explodes, killing everyone.
By fictionalising the surreal and disturbing news story, Van Sant directs a truly engrossing film, thanks to an effectively calibrated screenplay and an editing rhythm capable of keeping you glued to the screen until the very last beats.
The main model seems to be 'Quel pomeriggio di un giorno da cani' (That Dog Day Afternoon), Sidney Lumet's extraordinary feature film, with which it shares the theme of hostages, but also a reasoning about economic discrepancies, and the presence of Al Pacino, the protagonist in the 1975 cult film and the company's villainous boss in Van Sant's film.
