Frankenheimer: Ronin (1998)

Ronin was John Frankenheimer’s last great car chase vehicle and it’s one of his most spectacular. Set across a brittle, metallic Europe that’s still dominated by the palette if not the politics of the Cold War, it uses a cursory heist narrative as the pretext for a series of spectacular chases and set pieces, some of which take place on the French Riviera, and some of which take place in Paris. By this point in his career, Frankenheimer had perfected the car chase as a kind of city symphony, especially in claustrophobic or cramped streets – beyond a certain speed, his films let you glimpse an entire city, with a mindful, almost meditative awareness of how small moments and minutiae formed part of the big picture. All Frankenheimer needed to do as an auteur was to maintain that speed, stay at that informational horizon, supersede each new evolution in surveillance - and, in Ronin, it’s clear that that involves outwitting emergent mobile phone technology. Not only are there phones in every scene, but Frankenheimer’s camera continually aspires to the perspective of a roaming mobile signal – moving ethereally over town and mountain, the subliminal undulations of his Steadicam triangulate and incorporeate a bewildering number of points of view into every take. That makes every space feel as labyrinthine as a nascent car chase, especially in the spectacular showdown, set against the Paris of La Defense – an endless devolution of highways and tunnels, with the Seine shot as just another industrial corridor. Admittedly, it’s a vision that frosts over charisma, character, regional difference – as Frankenheimer’s camera glides across his frozen surfaces, you almost forget that this cast includes Robert de Niro, Jean Reno, Natasha McElhone and Stellan Skarsgard, among others. Almost, but not quite, since these characters are more like spies cast adrift from the end of the Cold War, rather than, say, the neoliberal mercenaries of Heat, whom the film occasionally recalls – they burn with a soulful displacement that has to believe that order, structure and security still exist out there somewhere, even if they’re entirely evacuated from Frankenheimer’s meticulous mise-en-scenes.