When she finds her way to the truth, it yields little sense of actual or figurative light - the denouement takes place in darkness and in near-silence, as the culmination of a long-standing familial fracture. But she embodies little of the classic authority of the investigating protagonist: she expresses herself untidily and allows herself to identify too much with the dead man (to the point of almost accidentally replicating his suicide), and she's much more watched upon than she is the watcher - the fact that the dead man was found dressed as a woman contributes to the sense of destabilization. As the detective doing the unsuitable job - engaged by a rich man to find out why his son hanged himself - Pippa Guard's Cordelia Gray unearths clues and follows leads as capably as any man probably would, and has sufficient physical agility and determination to escape at her major moment of peril. I don't know anything about the P D James source material, but Chris Petit's film of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman has a dark and unexpected take on its catchy title.
0 kommentar(er)
