Dark Crimes
starring Jim Carrey, Marton Csokas and Charlotte Gainsbourg,
written by Jeremy Brock
directed by Alexndros Avranas
Rating: ♦♦♦◊◊
Dark Crimes is a detective drama set in Poland, based on the article “True Crime: A Postmodern Murder Mystery” by David Grann, about convicted murderer Krystian Bala, published in 2008 in The New Yorker.
Krystian Bala was a Polish writer. In his first novel Amok (2003) he wrote into his novel a "fictional" version of the real-life killing of Dariusz Janiszewski, a Polish small business owner, in 2000, using information only the murderer could have known. The case drew widespread media coverage in Poland and resulted in increased sales of the novel as readers looked for clues in the novel to the real-life events of Janiszewski's death. Bala was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to a long prison term. It’s some excessively twisted Polish thing.
Principal photography was done in Krakow, Poland. Carrey plays Polish police detective Tadek, a disgraced officer working out his career as a clerk in the Archives office through the grace of friends until he can retire. Why he is disgraced is unclear to me, but it seems that he’s the only honest man in a corrupt post-Communist police force.
Tadek takes on a cold case involving the murder of a businessman. To his and everyone's surprise the case is identical to a character's murder in a recently published novel by a man named Kozlov - a despicable character played by Marton Csokas. While the crime appears to be an open and shut case, Tadek discovers a darker secret. The crime involves an extreme, perverted underground sex club. We keep getting titillating cutaway flashbacks to the goings on at the sex club, but that’s not where the current story is for Tadek.
The film got very poor reviews, but I thought it was great. I thought Carrey nicely portrayed the extreme tension of a conflicted man holding it all together in a tense political environment while maintaining his virtue. He’s the only good cop in Poland. Is it because contemporary American audiences and critics are conditioned to expect big bangs with loud action? A film is considered no better than second best unless it’s a comic book super hero story? Damn the reviews. I liked it. And, I never thought of Poland as being a beautiful country before. Beautiful rural landscapes and beautiful cities, just like cities anywhere.
One thing I especially liked about Dark Crimes was the sound: the sounds of footsteps on a wooden floor; the sound of doorknobs turning; the sound of rain hitting the pavement, the sound of movement within a room and the dry sound of rattling paper. It was almost like listening to a Terrence Malick film. Not watching a Terrence Malick film. Listening to it. I mean, the sound acuity was like a National Geographic documentary.