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ASHLAND INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL Lights, camera, action: Film fest underway Comment By John Darling For the Tidings DailyTidings.com By John Darling For the Tidings Posted Apr. 9, 2015 at 5:44 PM By John Darling For the Tidings Posted Apr. 9, 2015 at 5:44 PM » Social News The 14th annual Ashland Film Festival opened Thursday with a controlled frenzy of lines, rushes and will-calls, a big opening bash and the welcome sense that you never know what you’re getting into when the lights go down, but it will be engaging.  Such was “The Man From Reno,” which really should have been called, “The Fascinating Young Mystery Novelist From Japan, On the Loose in San Francisco and Blundering Into a Real Mystery Stranger Than Anything She Could Write.”  The novelist, Aki, gets picked up in a bar and beds with this young Asian man in a hotel. Who is he? We don't know and she doesn't know? Concurrently, in a dense fog, the sheriff of fictitious San Marco County runs over an Asian chap, but the guy was all beat up to begin with. Then the lover disappears but his suitcase appears in her hotel room along with a fortune in rare turtles. You struggle to weave this all together. As you should.  Nobody is who they say they are. Except the down-home sheriff. He is who he says he is - and he keeps getting drawn deeper into this and gets the picture, that a lot of people would like to have passports and drivers licenses that allow them to escape their past lives and become free, autonomous Americans in California.  The aging sheriff, however, begins to tune into the complexities of the plot and in the end, “gets it,” but lets the main killer and identity thief get away to ply his deadly trade on Japanese tourists. It brings in the melding of Japanese and West Coast cultures and the echo of Jack Nicholson’s comment, “It’s Chinatown,” meaning, it’s their thing, their crime, leave it alone. Hilarious moments come as they try to figure out the meaning of the Japanese word "kami." Well, it could mean God, hair, paper or turtles. We need to find out.  It brings up the whole thing of noir. What is it? It’s shot in back-and-white and has that persistent way of insidiously pushing its themes in your face without ever getting explicit about them. You are left with the vague feeling that, in most parts of the world, life is cheap, intimacy is fleeting and you are free to say that who you are is what you say you are. Go ahead and do what you want, if it helps you from being an outsider, a loser, struggling for survival.  Noir is, as Marshall McLuhan said, a “cool medium.” It refuses to fill in all the blanks or answer the mysteries. It gets you super-involved as you try to participate in and understand the story, yet you know you don’t and can’t own the story. You are left with a handful of mystery, as you realize you don’t grasp most of the motives of most of the people in it. This is not a movie Jimmy Stewart could have starred in, though, in “Vertigo,” he tried. We struggle to inhabit the sheriff, a likeable and good man, but in the end, we find him going over the gossip tabloids from Japan as they speculate on the whereabouts of the long-missing novelist -- and no one but the sheriff and the killer have any real idea what happened to her.  In the end, good does not prevail. That is noir. Morality does not get tied up in a bow. Life goes on, quite mysteriously. John Darling is an Ashland freelance writer. Reach him at [email protected].   By John Darling For the Tidings DailyTidings.com By John Darling For the Tidings Posted Apr. 9, 2015 at 5:44 PM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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