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Movies & TV

Man From Reno, and the joys of discovery

Tomorrow (Saturday August 1), a small American thriller called Man From Reno opens for a limited run at The Royal. You might not have heard of it, but you’ll want to check it out.

Man From Reno follows two characters through a twisty labyrinth of … well, not mystery exactly, but certainly confusion. Things happen that can’t quite be explained, and other things that seem perfectly straightforward turn out to be fairly complicated. And then there’s this whole other thing about – well, you’ll see.

On a foggy day in a small northern California town, sheriff Paul Del Moral (veteran character actor Pepe Serna) hits a man (Hiroshi Watanabe) with his car. Del Moral gets him to the hospital, but the man vanishes before he can explain what he was doing on the road.

Elsewhere, an author named Aki (Ayako Fujitani) abruptly announces the end of her popular series of crime novels. Hiding out in San Francisco, she meets the charming Akira Suzuki (Kazuki Kitamura) and takes him to bed – and then he disappears, too.

Paul and Aki’s stories will come together eventually, but Man From Reno is at its best when they’re separated, trying to figure out exactly what’s happening to them and why. The film is directed and co-written by Dave Boyle, who’s previously been known for melancholy dramas with Asian-American leads: White On Rice and Surrogate Valentine played the Reel Asian Film Festival in 2009 and 2011, respectively.)

Man From Reno marks new territory for Boyle, both conceptually and in terms of scale: he’s never attempted anything like this before, which might explain why certain moments feel more calculated than perhaps they should – as though the movie is holding its breath to see if an idea will work, or if the audience will make a connection. He shouldn’t have worried Serna and Fujitani are compelling leads, driving our interest even when the movie makes its biggest conceptual leaps.

Man From Reno didn’t screen at Reel Asian last year, or at any other Toronto film festivals, but it feels like precisely the sort of picture that should have. It would have done really well in a festival setting, bubbling up slowly as more and more people cottoned onto its unique vibe and strange charms. That’s a shame, but now you can discover it for yourself on a lazy summer weekend. And that’s not a bad thing at all.

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