Directed by Johan Grimonprez. Club, IFI/Screen, Dublin, 80 min
JOHAN GRIMONPREZ has come up with a wonderful idea. Scratch that. Johan Grimonprez has come up with a dozen wonderful ideas.
The Belgian artist's satisfyingly original film – not really a documentary, certainly not a drama — takes its cue from a Jorge Luis Borges story to weave together impressions of Cold War politics with meditations on the art of Alfred Hitchcock. Along the way, he interviews a professional Hitch impersonator and finds time (wait for the credits, you post-modernists) to include a blast of The Dead Kennedys' Holiday in Cambodia. The fact that Double Takeisn't nearly as odd or as unsettling as it should be is almost beside the point. We should simply rejoice that such things exist.
Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy, his writer, imagine Hitchcock experiencing a troubling hallucination while shooting The Birdsin 1963. The director encounters a version of himself who appears to be living in 1980 (the year Hitch eventually died) and, while he carries on an elliptical conversation with this doppelganger, we watch archive footage of the great man and contemporaneous news coverage of key encounters between the US and USSR.
Here’s the real Hitchcock camping it up with Tippi Hedren. Here’s Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev squabbling before the famous Kitchen Debate. The fictional Hitchcock appears solely in voice-over.
What’s it all mean? Well, disappointingly, one strain of the film is all too easy to disentangle. As events progress, it becomes clear that Grimonprez is arguing that the US and USSR were, in some sense, their own doppelgangers. Locked in a colossal political tussle, the combatants’ feints and shuffles are constantly cancelled out by those of their opponent in the looking glass.
It's a fairly banal point and, alas, it characterises a film that, though consistently diverting, is not nearly as barmy as it thinks itself to be. If you want strange, watch Hitch's
Frenzyor read Borges's
August 25th, 1983. Now, there lies brilliant madness.
