Kiss or Kill is a film noir in every way except for its visuals. It’s a crime thriller featuring two hapless con artists who accidentally kill a mark and go on the run across the Australian outback. So instead of dark alleys and underground nightclubs we get blazing hot deserts, out of the way motels, and a nuclear missile silo. Does that disqualify it from the genre?
As if. Kiss or Kill in many ways is the perfect distillation of film noir. As with the best examples of the genres, Al (Matt Day) and Nikki (the fetching Frances O’Connor in an early role) are in over their head almost from the beginning. The child Nikki watched her father set her mother on fire, and now she suffers from sleepwalking. The man they mistakenly kill has a videotape incriminating a famous footballer, and everyone they encounter seems to end up murdered while they sleep. Does Nikki’s somnambulating also include slicing people’s throats? Al isn’t so sure, and his mistrust of his lover/partner in crime only grows as the movie progresses. Meanwhile, the footballer pursues the couple, and the amusing Barry Otto appears as a stowaway who lives in a decommissioned missile silo—and who may be more than he appears.
The story is captivating, but Kiss or Kill is distinguished by some stark aesthetic choices. There is no music at all—no title music, no diegetic tunes on the radio, and the end credits roll by in complete silence. This absence has an interesting effect—it heightens unease, even in comic scenes. But there is comedy—this is not a heavy meditation, but a breezy sort of caper. Barry Otto’s Adler is a sad and bizarre character—that is, until a secret is revealed about him. The two detectives chasing both the con artists and the footballer stop for a funny conversation that builds into a savage practical joke. Even the Aboriginal tracker they hire has a light touch about him. No “noble savage,” he.
The most distinctive and jarring aesthetic choice is a surfeit of jump cuts that makes Breathless look like an Antonioni film. Writer-director Bill Bennett chops the middle out of pans, tilts, and dollies as if he’s too impatient (or senses the audience is) to suffer the transitions. At first it seems like he’s just cutting out the fat—a convention we see more and more today, speed ramps and jump cuts imploring an attention-poor audience to stick with the show. But no, I think Bennett has another idea. He’s transforming film from a medium of time to one of time’s absence. Whereas Christopher Nolan uses stories and structures to manipulate time (Memento, Dunkirk, Interstellar), Bennett uses the humble cut. Kiss or Kill is full of lost moments, putting us in Nikki’s cute shoes when she sleepwalks, Al’s boots when he awakens to exsanguinated corpses, and the detectives’ loafers as they piece together the multilayered mystery. That Bennett’s editing strategy keeps the film short and quick is merely a side benefit.
Kiss or Kill’s story, settings, and characters make this a fun and entertaining addition to the film noir library. But the editing is a major reason Kiss or Kill makes my most-remembered films of the 1990s list. Yes, the jarring cuts serve a narrative role, but they’re also a reminder that rules are made to be broken. If a scene is a nanosecond too long, chop out a few frames. Edit enough films and you get a sense of the right number of frames for each shot. For Krzystof Kieslowski, the amount of time a sugar cube needed to fully saturate with coffee was five seconds—no more, no less. So he tested numerous brands until he found his five-second sugar cube. Bill Bennett sculpted the correct timing on the editing table—just like the rest of us do, only he did it with more brutality and more precision. In Amadeus, Mozart protests the criticism that his music contains “too many notes.” “There are just as many notes, Majesty, as are required. Neither more nor less!” he ripostes. Replace notes with frames and Bill Bennett is right there with you, Wolfgang.
