Keitel's Mumbai, Florid

"Pakistan is no ordinary country."-- Benazir Bhutto's last preface.

One thing neither John Irvin nor his screen writer Ken Solarz answer for is the underlying cowardice of Stephen Dorff's character Skip Kovich in their latter day City of Industry. Dorff’s motivation for icing the heist crew put together by Timothy Hutton, who is seemingly in the preliminary stage of getting his lead role on Leverage, this woebegone every American kid of Taps and the brittle, frightening scenes in Ordinary People, invisibly axed in a jump shot by a snow cone Dorff, this flinty indifferent spree killer with scant principle to speak of, we’re to presume he fears Elliot Gould’s muscle, given the carnage that burns through the reel beyond the brief back story putting the figurines in place? He certainly fears being outnumbered.

Irvin’s transition from ensemble to allowing for the aging Keitel to absorb the weight of the lead and the pursuit remains intriguing, as is the relationship he develops between Keitel and Janssen in her role as the vulnerable brass tacks widow. The film itself is also transitional, between then and now. Not wholly a procedural of the past, with a signature detective rectifying matters, nor quite a gut wound graphic, such as we might see with The Following, or in Bryan Fuller and David Slade’s dark aesthetic. Little is left to the imagination, but the gore isn’t quite so pronounced as it would be for Tarantino.

The punishment that the elder Egan absorbs is a puzzling ambiguity, even somewhat fantastical, with Roy hovering between life and death as he fractures Skip’s skull. The agony Keitel projects is the only Dionysian passion he allows Roy Egan to have, as one wonders if he does die and is in fact reborn, miraculously defying his chest wound in these muted enclosures, Hutton’s fatal optimism dappled in Florida sunlight, with Roy’s pursuit of Skip moving in gradations from shadows to the expansive danger of a post midnight world. Does Irvin’s denouement suggest an escapism similar to Morrison’s hymn for her ravenous ghost?

Fantastical flights of fantasy can reinforce narrative meaning, as they do in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or they can make the moral gratuitous, as happens in Beloved. City of Industry wobbles on a balance beam between unifying impact and lack of responsibility for its glamorization, but it‘s worth examination.

Pakistan exists as a weak and marginally governable state because the British administers in Asia did not heed their literary masochist, EM Forster. Thanks to his novels the western hemisphere is a homosexual police state. If you know how Pakistani and Indian differ ethnically feel free to cue me in.