The Strada film club closes the cycle dedicated to Michael Mann, with an iconic work, “Heat”, this Wednesday June 4 at 5:30 p.m. There are detective films which tell the story of a heist, a hunt, a confrontation. And then there is “Heat”. Not a criminal story, but a metaphysical vibration. At Michael’s Mann, the thriller ceases to be a genre: it becomes a mental geography. Los Angeles is not a setting but a nervous system, an electrical organism where men incapable of inhabiting their own lives circulate.
From the first minutes, “Heat” imposes a singular material. The metallic blue of the nights, the reflective windows, the highway interchanges like abstract lines: Mann films the city as Antonioni filmed modern architecture, that is to say as the physical proof of an interior separation. Everything in “Heat” relates to distance – distance between beings, between bodies, between desires and their possible fulfillment. The genius of the film lies first of all in its refusal of the spectacular as a goal.
This is where “Heat” becomes profoundly modern: in this idea that absolute professionalism consumes all intimacy. Mann films men who have transformed their identity into protocol. And yet, at the heart of this apparent dryness, “Heat” is shot through with an immense melancholy. A silent sadness irrigates every shot. In Mann, the characters know before us that their fate is sealed. Heat is perhaps the definitive film on the disappearance of men in their own systems.
