Although the definition of neo-noir feels too restrictive for many of the films to which it is applied, in the case of Thief, the formula takes on the characteristics of an artistic statement. In his first film for the big screen (after the The Jericho Mile for television), Michael Mann demonstrates that he understands the genre (and classical style) so completely that he is able to transform and reshape its basic mechanisms. The melancholy of the thief, who gives the film its original title, is a mix of disillusionment and existentialism directed romantically towards the impossibility of true happiness. In James Caan, it finds an actor capable of expressing himself through an entirely original use of body and facial expressions. Then there is the urban space, deconstructed so knowingly (equalled by Mann perhaps only in Collateral) that it resembles a manifesto for contemporary urban photography: it is a metropolis of acute loneliness and nocturnal dispersion, crossed with danger and individualism. The sense of abstraction is absolute and further heightened by a soundtrack (by Tangerine Dream), which made history for its amazing electronic and rhythmic experimentation. Nevertheless, this passion for geometry, doors, windows, streets, architecture, and labyrinths does not extinguish the underlying humanism, which is fuelled by timeworn emotions (love, friendship, the desire to put down roots) in a universe that ignores or erases them in the interest of a cold, criminal capitalism that can no longer be stopped. Like neonoir, then, Thief updates the dark vision of destiny found in the classics (including the French policier) to a hermetic, synthetic, and modern aesthetic in which, nonetheless, human passions remain intact – even if they are less common and more unexpected. It is a beginning for the 1980s in which – together with the new language of fashion and the music video – auteurs like Mann, Schrader (American Gigolo), Friedkin (Cruising), and Coppola (One from the Heart) rewrote the surface of images.

Roy Menarini