Shadows and Fog (Woody Allen, 1992)
Rekha has recently discovered that she loves Mia Farrow. What a great excuse to watch all these great old films. Farrow is like Woody Allen's Anna Karina (Diane Keaton is his Anne Wiazemsky). You can just see that his camera loves her. I noticed two things that I didn’t pick up the first time I watched it: that this film is simultaneously a tribute to Fritz Lang and Alain Resnais. It owes a lot to the former in the structure of the story: a vigilante group searches for a serial killer in the night. The city is old, small and European looking and the general feeling is 1930s. But the other moment I didn't notice was the scene in which the doctor/coroner is musing aloud about the nature of evil and wanting to know what makes the killer tick. The camera pans dramatically from left to right (the way that Resnais made famous in his films Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad.) on a bloodied corpse beneath a sheet. The specter of fascism looming over civilization and the whole time this is a comedy!!!