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Candid camera, obscuring camera, "which is the evil twin?" Brian De Palma avails himself of Bernard Herrmann's trembling strings and Margot Kidder's resemblance to Simone Simon in her Val Lewton period, and forges ahead into splintered-psyche territory. The opening sequence shows how much society has appropriate De Niro's ideas in Hi, Mom!: The peeper's dilemma at the bathhouse is now TV fodder, voyeur (Lisle Wilson) and decoy (Kidder) hook up in "The African Room." The barbed Freudian joke has the heroine, a Québécoise model, as the surviving half of conjoined sisters, her scarred hip is fondled by her lover. The vanquished sibling lives in her guilt and springs to bloody action the morning after, the doctor who severed them (William Finley) drops by to mop the mess up, the whole thing is witnessed by a reporter (Jennifer Salt). The obsessive use of doubles begins in the title (familial bonds, "right on!" feminism) and extends to the form itself with bifurcated frames, parallel montages (endearments scrawled letter by letter on a birthday cake while the heroine writhes on the bathroom floor), the split-screen of the stabbed camera. Rear Window is directly quoted and the living-room coffin from Rope makes a telling appearance, though the filmmaker's great affinity with Hitchcock resides in his understanding of a world built on suppression and the castrating frenzies that ensue. A wide-angle POV shot precipitates the climactic hallucination, with its virtuosic twitches of Wiene and Browning and Powell bringing a butcher's cleaver down into a Francis Bacon composition—De Palma's surgery is one of (film history) memory reconstruction and transference, "complications" and all. Fatally penetrated, the patriarch tries to penetrate back and expires atop his complicit victim; the only thing more excoriating is the closing view of unclaimed evidence and shrouded truth. With Charles Durning, Barnard Hughes, and Dolph Sweet.
--- Fernando F. Croce |