Grounding

I thought about this line from Thom Andersen while watching Richard Fleishcer's Violent Saturday last night:

As thriller plots have lost their moorings in the real world of causes and effects, something valuable has been lost. When actions become arbitrary, stories lose their power to help us make sense of the world and they become strictly formal patterns. Thus many of us now turn to documentaries for the emotional knowledge we once found in fiction films.

Andersen qualifies this - "[y]et these formal patterns can still be of some use: they can describe a world, more or less adequately, and they can make it strange" - but his original point is still worth mulling over. Violent Saturday feels very different from many of the post-Jean-Pierre Melville crime pictures - like Michael Mann's Collateral or Johnnie To's Exiled - because the crime is taking place within a recognizable social setting. It's economically built and perhaps not that deep, but it has a genuine breadth. The actions of the criminals aren't measured according to an abstract code, but rather by how they upset the existing web of compromise and failed hopes that make up the movie's small town America.