Almost Blue

It is hard to see how anyone could trash this film on the criteria of craft. It is a very well made film that understands its genre and goes beyond it. In terms of generic revisionism, this film goes beyond the genre by structuring within the plot a woman trying to compete in a man's world: the detective charged with catching the serial killer. Layered onto that is the role of technology in creating a surveillance culture. Carefully plotted so that the viewer will suspect the wrong person for half the film, it creates a complex investigation, not into personal psychology, but into contemporary society: university culture, techno-pop and music culture, cop culture, and patriarchal culture.

Ironically enough, such a sustained examination of these cultural cross-currents do not anchor the film into Italy specifically--something that is exceedingly rare for an Italian film. This plot could have been just as easily set in Kracow, Oxford, Munich, Ann Arbor, or Berkeley.

It is compelling, complex, and well crafted. Tension builds, is dispersed, and builds again, only to have a twist throw it off yet again. Complaining about it generically is not only off-base, but the equivalent to complaining that every western has horses in it.