Mist Opportunity

Not many films in the 60 years since Robert Flaherty's immortal Louisiana Story have evoked the atmosphere of the Bayou State as strongly as Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist, a movie that doesn't seem to have been filmed so much as distilled, on a creaking porch beset by mosquitos and summer heat, with the rumble of a gathering storm in the distance. Adapted from the novel by James Lee Burke, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones as Burke's popular detective character, Dave Robichaux, here investigating the murder of one Cherry LeBlanc, a "fatally beautiful" 19-year-old prostitute whose mutilated corpse washes up on shore in the film's opening scene. Not long after that, another body -- this one belonging to a lynched black man dead and gone some 40 years -- surfaces deep in the swamp, loosed by Hurricane Katrina's churning tide.

Since it was first announced, In the Electric Mist has sounded like an ideal project for Tavernier, combining two of the veteran French filmmaker's great passions: the American South (previously explored in his 1985 documentary, Mississippi Blues) and American pulp fiction (the basis for 1981's Oscar-nominated Coup de torchon, which transposed Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French colonial Africa). But it's been a long road to Berlin for In the Electric Mist, which was shot on location in 2007 only to become entangled in post-production disagreements between Tavernier and the film's American producer, Michael Fitzgerald (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada).

When the dust finally settled, two different versions of the movie emerged -- an "international" cut prepared by Tavernier, which screened here in Berlin and will be released in most countries around the world, and an "American" cut supervised by Fitzgerald that runs 15 minutes shorter and will go directly to DVD in the U.S. next month. In comparing the two edits, Variety critic Leslie Felperin deemed the American version "brisker but less-coherent" with "tacky summing up and [an] oo!-spooky last shot mini twist that makes [it] play like a made-for-TV movie."

Having seen only Tavernier's version, I can say that it's unfortunate American audiences may never get a chance to experience this superior detective yarn on the big screen, in the form its director intended. Unfortunate, but by no means surprising. Indeed, where the default Hollywood position would have been to strip-mine Burke's source material for its narrative chassis while junking all its atmospheric touches, tertiary supporting characters and curlicue digressions, Tavernier (working from a script credited to the husband-and-wife team of Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski) does exactly the opposite. Much like Burke himself on the page, he plays up the bass line at the expense of the melody, showing markedly less interest in the identity of the killer(s) than in a long and winding history of Southern injustice that stretches from Jim Crow to George W. Bush. Long ago, Robichaux says in the lyrical voice-over that opens the film, people placed heavy stones on the graves of the dead so as to weigh down the souls of the departed. But in Burke and Tavernier's world, every time a storm blows through, those stones become displaced, and restless spirits take to wandering the bayou.

This is the Burke adaptation fans of the author deserved, but were sorely denied by the 1996 film version of another Robichaux novel, Heaven's Prisoners, with an altogether unconvincing Alec Baldwin in the lead. Jones, by contrast, slips effortlessly into the character's skin -- a bit too effortlessly, some might argue, given the actor's history of playing no-nonsense lawmen. But pay close attention to the jittery impatience in Dave Robichaux's voice, his clumsiness of gesture, the faint uncertainty in his recovering alcoholic's eyes, and you will see a character many jurisdictions removed from The Fugitive's cocksure Marshal Samuel Gerard and No Country For Old Men's wizened and weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

If In the Electric Mist is finally less than completely satisfying as a murder mystery, as a piece of cultural anthropology it is never less than deeply absorbing. History and myth freely intermingle with the present, particularly in the case of what may be the movie's cleverest conceit -- a Civil War-era film within the film, starring a hell-raising Hollywood actor (a highly amusing Peter Sarsgaard) and a cast of hundreds, although the Confederate General (Levon Helm) Robichaux keeps encountering in the nighttime fog seems more than a mere costumed extra.

Elsewhere, Tavernier's movie runs thick with gut-bucket jazz and blues, regional accents so foreign that the film's Berlin press screenings carried English subtitles, and local fat cats with names like "Babyfeet" Balboni (wonderfully oily John Goodman) and "Twinky" Lemoyne (Ned Beatty) who add to the Chinatown-like air of pervasive corruption. One murder blends into another, and the only meaningful punishment is meted out not by the hands of the law, but by those of father time. Ultimately, "whodunit?" seems a question as unanswerable as a Zen koan -- except, perhaps, in the producer's cut.