Man from Reno is an unexpected treat – a captivating neo-noir that resonates with the psychic weight of its genre forebears, while still retaining its own unique voice and full set of surprises. The story is set in San Francisco, but not the tech wonderland the city has usually been portrayed as in the last fifteen years. No, this is Sam Spade’s San Francisco, a city of shadows and shadowers, where a trip to the bar is sure to bring a fateful encounter with a mysterious stranger and elegantly furnished hotels are hotbeds of sinister activities. Just like Spade’s most famous adventure centered on the unlikely Macguffin of a diamond-encrusted bird, Man from Reno hinges on a lot of smuggled, ultra-rare turtles; the objects themselves mattering little to the writers other than the myriad layers of deceit undertaken to acquire them.
But the turtles aren’t even discovered until halfway through the film. Before that, the film’s two, greatly different protagonists have a chance run-in with a stranger and proceed to investigate based on intuition. The film opens with the first, literal run-in, as rural Sheriff Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna) accidentally runs into a Japanese man who already appears grievously injured on a foggy, unlit road. When the Sheriff tries to help, the man runs away, leaving the Sheriff feeling guilty and curious. Meanwhile, we’re introduced to our other protagonist, Aki Akimora (Ayako Fujitani), a Japanese crime novelist who is in San Francisco outrunning the fame of her popular fictional detective Inspector Takabe. Aki is ambivalent about the success of her series and claims the next book is the last, but she shares with her creation a natural inquisitiveness and a Sherlock Holmes-like ability to guess someone’s background from surface clues. As a crime novelist investigating abroad, she calls to mind The Third Man’s American bumbler Holly Martins and while she shares some of his naiveté, she’s ultimately a more complex and sympathetic character. She meets a handsome man in a bar and spends the night with him. The next day, he disappears mysteriously, leaving five turtles swimming in the tank of her hotel toilet, setting off a whole host of other strange encounters.
The two main characters are delightfully different. Fujitani plays the novelist as a perfect mix of withdrawn and curious and while of course the novelist is given better lines, Serna still distinguishes his Sheriff character with a ragged decency. We’re conditioned to see these two investigations converge, so it’s a pleasure to see them converge and than once again diverge for a surprising ending. The direction never lets you forget you’re watching a noir – ratcheting up the atmosphere, framing characters troubled and alone, bathing characters in shadow and sometimes silhouetting them completely – and yet I still felt shocked when the film avoided the conventional happy ending I thought it was headed towards and went a darker route more true to the genre.
Man from Reno is a perfect blend of the familiar and the unexpected. Director Dave Boyle imbues the traditional noir formula with cross-cultural intrigue, unexpected plot twists, and a winningly unusual protagonist in Aki, resulting in a thoroughly entertaining mystery.
