The Modernism Post

Piccadilly greatly disappointed me. Not just because of its failure to live up to its DVD cover art’s promise of partial nudity, but for its failure to live up to the promise of energy delivered by the first few scenes. This establishing journey from the cityscape to the bowels of the “club” gave me an incredible sensation of momentum, each iteration (from the skyline, to the street, to the foyer, to the dance hall/restaurant, to the kitchen, and finally to the scullery) amplifying this ominous feeling of moving deeper into the belly of some machine. It may sound excessive to say that the hygiene-conscious nightclub owner looking for the wrench in the works reminded me of a Philip Marlowe tracing leads to some nuclear truth, but my sense of progression and expectation of revelation was roughly on par.

This trajectory terminated, of course, at the scullery, where Victor finally discovered Shosho. I was relieved by this inertia, finding the austerity of the room and the dance a soothing contrast to the excess of booze and jazz in the public areas of the club. The indolent, transfixed workers, the Oriental dancer, and the thin smoke rising around her gave the scullery an opiate quality relative to the alcoholic one made by dizzying images of Western patrons ordering and downing drinks. Also satisfying was the realisation that those same patrons, by turning their attention to the fat diner’s dirty plate, were more interested the maid’s dance than the professional’s. This theft of the show by proxy was like a wormhole that smashed through all the layers of space carefully established in the previous scenes.

But this climax occurred way too soon (oh grow up), the remainder of Piccadilly failing to match the kinetic energy of these first few scenes and becoming, like Claire said, slow and predictable. Marlowe, at least, had the good taste to solve the puzzle at the end of the movie. Perhaps restitution was sought by the murder and trial thrown in towards the end, but this seemed so arbitrary and hackneyed that I was amazed to find myself less intrigued by the mystery of the dead dancer than the mystery of the dirty dish.

Still, I found this symmetry of plot interesting. The immediate introduction and ending of the film that surround the two mysteries also act very similarly, smoothing out the transition between physical and cinematic realities: the opening credits appear naturalised in the cityscape, reproducing on screen the advertising and transit that would have brought audiences to the theatre in the first place; while the final shots of the human billboards (what do you call those guys again?) and their message of transience provide an egress back to the physical world. Of course, this effect may have been a little lost on me and anyone else who did not go out to see Piccadilly but brought it home with them, but I believe that even when watching movies in private we tend to keep in mind the archetype of the public screening.