Truly Dreadful Film

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

best movie i've ever seen.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Brian De Palma doesn't believe in realism: he believes in cinema, in the sweeping gestures of yesteryear film noir. His "Dressed to Kill" was a chromium shaded exercise in thriller style fixated on its look and feel; "Body Double" characterized itself with long-tracking shots and grimy excursions into the underground metropolises of entertainment. In "Obsession", it is made clear that De Palma isn't playing it cool this time around; he's taken with the slow-motion breathiness of "Rebecca" and "Vertigo", concentrated less on spreading a silvery sheen and more focused on winsome melodrama. "Obsession" is not as successful as De Palma's other style-over-substance pictures (most released in the 1970s); being slippery and sleazy is his strong suit, and the film is more prone to melting its surroundings with sweaty psychosexual entanglements. Not a problem -- "Obsession" is far from a failure -- but its forays into the absurd have a more lurid effect than a stylistically sexy one. The film begins in 1959 at the anniversary party of Michael (Cliff Robertson) and Elizabeth (Geneviève Bujold) Courtland. They've been married for a decade, and still intact is their devotion to one another. But the harmonious symphony that surrounds them suddenly turns ominous when it is discovered that the butler is carrying a gun in his pocket. Later that night, Elizabeth, along with their daughter, are kidnapped, ransom money demanded the next day. A rescue mission follows, but it is too late: the kidnappers botch the plan, resulting in the death of Elizabeth and the child. "Obsession" then jumps to 1976. Michael is still not over the tragedy, mourning eternally. "He lives in 1959," a concerned friend notes. Then, on a business trip to Italy, his life takes a turn for the better (and the completely insane). While visiting the church that he first met his wife, he sees a woman painting for a restoration project. But it isn't just some woman: it is his wife, or at least her double. Of course, he becomes obsessed, obsessed with turning her into his late wife, that is. He takes her back to America in hopes to get married, but just as things seem too good to be true, De Palma and his screenwriter, Paul Schrader, rip our throats out with a number of batty plot twists. Ludicrous as it is, I enjoyed "Obsession". Sure, it comes on to you like a "Vertigo"-loving film historian, but its madness is created by a logical, daring auteur better than his material. De Palma matches the over-the-top aura with deceptively over-the-top camera-work, distinguishing art from human drama through pulsating close-ups, strained slow motion sequences, and darkened, menacing angles. Without De Palma's aesthetically bizarre eye, perhaps "Obsession" would merely be ludicrous melodrama instead of stylish ludicrous melodrama. Even then, the style isn't quite overbearing enough for us to ignore the unbelievable story. The conflict asks for no questions to be answered, to leave things enigmatic as to make the romance all the more operatic and fantastical. But its eventual (and disturbing) decision to end in a way that can be explained is more disappointing than one would expect. "Obsession" is the kind of film that begs to be left alone in an unanswerable universe a la Lynch. If only it would do the smart thing and retain its intrigue until we can hardly bear it.

The first 10 minutes of this movie is an exercise in pure style. DE PALMA uses BERNARD HERMANN's stunning background score to great effect. The rest of the film never really measures up to the first 10 minutes.The story (by PAUL SCHRADER and DE PALMA) is preposterous. But frankly, who cares? The film is wonderful to look and HERMANN's score is a pleasure to listen to. I wonder if the makers of OLD BOY were inspired by this film.Geneviève Bujold is not in the same league as some of the stunning Hitchcockian heroines. Cliff Robertson grows on you as the film progresses. I guess he was perfect for the role of the Southern patriarch. John Lithgow looked sinister. He is never boring.(8/10)

Brian De Palma has never denied that his main influence is the work of Alfred Hitchcock, yet, his early movies especially, have often been unfairly dismissed as rip-off's. This, of course, is simply not true, and I argue that De Palma allow his films to flourish with his own sense of style and intrigue, while closely following themes that the great master observed himself. Of all his more Hitchcockian productions, Obsession is one his least remembered when compared to the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980) or Body Double (1984). It's certainly one of De Palma's more ludicrous and often outright barmy films, but there is much to enjoy here in a guilty sort of way.In 1959, wealthy real estate developer Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) receives a ransom note demanding $500,000 in cash for the return of his wife and daughter. The police are notified, and following a botched arrest, his wife and daughter are killed in a getaway car. Fifteen years later, Michael, who seems to exist in a state of reserved grief, arrives in Florence with his friend and business colleague Robert Lasalle (John Lithgow) to tie up a land deal. While visiting the church he met his wife years before, he meets a young painter named Sandra (Genevieve Bujold) who is the exact doppelgänger of his dead wife.For all its frequently ridiculous and quite predictable twists and turns and overwrought melodrama, Obsession succeeds thanks to some stylish direction from De Palma and Bernard Herrmann's lavish, Oscar-nominated score. You can see the ending a mile away, but it does include a nice twist that borders on the repulsive, and with Robertson's subdued performance and Lithgow's reliable charismatic sidekick, the film never becomes quite as silly as it really should be. The main influence here is obviously Vertigo (1958), but retains none of the psychological mystery of Hitchcock's masterpiece, taking a more direct thriller route instead. Don't expect any plausibility (even the most absent-minded viewer could pick apart the plot), but if you can put this aside - or even welcome it - Obsession is a memorable little thriller that is surely due a small revival.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Start with "Vertigo", Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece in which a man becomes obsessed with "the image of a woman" to such an extent that he "remakes a woman to resemble this idealised image".Flash-forward to Brian De Palma's "Obsession" (1976), a film in which the director reveals himself to so obsessed with Hitchcock that he moulds his own film - literally his "Obsession" - into the image of Hitchcock's "Vertigo".Not only that, but the lead character of this "new film" is himself so obsessed with "the image of his lost wife" that he "remakes a strange woman to resemble his wife's image". The problem is, the woman he "remakes" is his daughter, his infatuation is incestuous and she's busy restoring or remaking a fresco in a church. End result? An obsessive remake of a film about remakes and obsessions which is itself about the destructive obsession of remaking. In other words, its an allegory for not only the postmodern predicament, but De Palma's own brand of cinema, which stages revivalism as a form of necrophilia, indecency, voyeurism or incest. The plot: Cliff Robertson plays Michael Courtland, a man paralysed by melancholia. Courtland, we learn, lost his wife and daughter during a bungled kidnapping and ransom situation many years ago. Rather than pay the kidnappers money, Courtland filled a suitcase with blank pieces of paper, an act of deception which led to the deaths of his wife and daughter. And that is the awful, crippling weight Courtland now bears: he chose the money over his family. Over the "real image". Money thus become abhorrent to Courtland, and he begins to increasingly associate his wealth with the loss of his wife and child. This becomes the first "risk" of the film: because he dared not risk losing something valuable, Courtland has lost the ability to find value in anything.Years later, however, Courtland sees a double of his dead wife. She's not only a "perfect image" but an "impossible image", as she looks not as she would be now, but exactly as she looked then. Furthermore, this strange doppelganger is working on – naturally - the restoration of a local church. It is here where she faces a dilemma: beneath one of the church's frescoes seems to be another painting. It could be a great lost masterpiece or it could be nothing. This is the second risk of the film: should she risk destroying the fresco for the sake of what might only be a stain?Of course this dilemma, this risk, is doubled in both Courtland and the doppelganger: should he investigate and dig deeper at the risk of destroying this young woman, or worse, destroying his image of her? And should she dig deeper into Courtland, at the risk of losing a potential lover?The film's ending, suffused with a dream-like haze (indeed, everything and everyone in the film seems dead, ghostly, like resurrected images), initially seems to be a happy ending, a moment of resolution, but look closer and it is a vaporous, disturbing, distinctly creepy thing; father and daughter, subject and object, lover and incestuous image, spinning around and around, gripping each other's hands…One must remember that De Palma directed both "Phantom of the Paradise" and "Get To Know Your Rabbit" before "Obsession". "Paradise" was about a devilish record producer who constantly resurrects nostalgia bands and an artist who, in aligning himself with a parasitic devil, sells his soul in order to make easy cash. So if "Obsession" is about resurrecting "images from the past", "Phantom's" preoccupied with a resurrecting of past sounds. And of course "Get To Know Your Rabbit" is about a man who quits this soul-deadening cycle to become an artist. How does he do this? He becomes a magician (a career choice which leads to him being exiled and ostracised by friends, co-workers and family) and trains under none other than Orson Welles, a director kicked out of Hollywood for refusing to sell his soul (or more correctly, repeatedly forced to sell his soul) and for being too original. Problem is, as soon as the film's hero becomes a successful magician, the devils come knocking again, quite literally consuming and turning the "magician's humble art" into an insidious version of corporate hell.The character arcs of every film De Palma made during this period therefore reflects his own career trajectory. Fired from "Get To Know Your Rabbit", with his early satirical/counterculture films making little money and with his career almost over with, De Palma was pushed, like Welles, into making thrillers to keep working. These thrillers are typically dismissed as works of pastiche (they are), but there's always a critical mind, a satirist, operating just underneath. In this regard, something like "Black Dahlia", dismissed as "noir homage", should really be viewed through the lens of De Palma's more political films ("Redacted" etc), or even the more playful "Phantom of Paradise"; one's about the rot of the music industry, the other about the rot of the image factory. Incidentally, the majority of "Obsession's" "incestuous subplot" was edited out (or cleverly masked using edits and fades) due to protests made by Bernard Herrmann and the film's producers. The result is the film's confused approach to the father and daughter romance at its core. Their incestuous relationship is not only barely acknowledged, but shamefully covered up.8/10 – A lushly shot, macabre comedy. Worth one viewing.