Man From Reno

Man From Reno is a gorgeous film with a central mystery that never quite lives up to its cinematography. Which is not to say the film is hollow beneath the surface—in fact, it gradually reveals a willingness to explore some interesting questions about identity, flirting in subtle (and unsubtle) ways with race, diaspora, and gender—but where the aesthetics and the performance of lead Ayako Fujitani are delivered with confident ease, the film’s themes and plot mechanics keep getting in each other’s way.
Probably taking a little too long to reveal that the mystery at the center of his film is in fact neatly tied to its exploration of identity, writer-director Dave Boyle creates the sense for much of The Man from Reno that there are actually two things going on at once: (1) a series of conversations between Japanese-American, Japanese, and non-Japanese characters about Japanese, American, and immigrant identities that (2) happen on the fringes of a fairly mundane noir narrative that revolves around a MacGuffin with an identity crisis all its own. It eventually turns out that these two threads are parallel—though saying how would spoil several late-film revelations—but until this is explained, the unclear relationship is distracting for much of the film, and is compounded by the fact that the mystery plot is itself told through two parallel narratives.
In the first, county sheriff Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna) hits a man (Hiroshi Watanabe) with his car one foggy night; the man disappears from the hospital before he can be questioned. Then a dead body (a different man) is found face down in a swamp in Paul’s jurisdiction a few days later. In the second narrative, mystery novelist Aki Akahori (Fujitani), having blown off a publicity tour to visit friends in San Francisco, meets a handsome man (Kazuki Kitamura) at her hotel and eventually spends the night with him. He later disappears, leaving behind a suitcase filled with clothing and…a head of lettuce. Paul and Aki meet when the former shows up to question the latter about the swampy dead body—identified as the man for whom she has filed a missing person report.