GUILLAUME LOISON WRITES ABOUT THE BLACK DAHLIA AT LE NOUVEL OBS
In an article originally published in 2022, but updated last week at Le Nouvel Obs, critic Guillaume Loison writes about Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia. Here's a portion, with the help of Google Translation:
This baroque adaptation of James Ellroy's novel by Brian De Palma is a dense, exciting and generous thriller, which says everything about the complicated relationship that the filmmaker has with the dream factory...A strange, imperfect but exciting object, "The Black Dahlia" has for Brian De Palma the air of a Hollywood last stand, a thwarted will. Produced by Art Linson, the man who financed "The Untouchables" and "Casualties of War" under classic conditions, this film is, this time, edited on the fringes of the studios, in line with the European projects shot by the filmmaker of "Femme Fatale" from the 2000s.
Relying on a myriad of foreign capital, it reconstructs in Bulgaria the Los Angeles of the 1940s, the setting for the investigation into the barbaric murder of Elizabeth Short, a beautiful and naive aspiring actress. Between concerns about economy and claimed scale - the presence of Scarlett Johansson, then at her peak, attests to this - the greenness of the staging and the deliquescent atmosphere, extreme stylization and explosions of savagery, "The Black Dahlia" traces a strange third way.
Its charm is nourished precisely by this ambivalence: in this, faithful to James Ellroy's novel, De Palma nestles in a profusion of trompe-l'oeil and colorful illusions, sketches lying and twin characters, weaves a maze of intrigues where vertigo and enthusiasm compete with a mixture of frustration and bitterness.
However, one must allow oneself to get lost in this semi-voluntary confusion to better appreciate the flashes of brilliance that emerge here and there, to cling sometimes to these captivating scansions that belong only to Ellroy (the lyrical voiceover), sometimes to the old obsessions of a filmmaker who, despite his brilliance and application, does not always manage to completely bend this rich material to his authorial vision.
However, "The Black Dahlia" awakens old "Depalmian" ghosts: the ashen photo of Vilmos Zsigmond, director of photography of "Blow out" (twenty-five years since they had filmed together), the furtive but traumatic presence of William Finley, the bespectacled actor of "Phantom of the Paradise", the spurts of hemoglobin and the large knives of "Sisters"... After this final swim in troubled waters, the filmmaker will definitively turn his back on Hollywood.