A Venice Film Festival Champion: An Intellectual Italian Puzzler As Opposed To A Straight-Up Thriller
Giuseppe Capotondi's Italian puzzler "The Double Hour" is a multi-layered story that resists easy definition. Like many, I was lured into the film by the usual devices. The DVD packaging promises a thriller with the overused (and seldom accurate) adjective Hitchcockian being employed. But the movie is considerably more complex than its advertising tagline "A Romance. A Robbery. A Mystery." would have you believe. I'm not saying this to be critical, but to help realign viewer expectations. Anyone approaching "The Double Hour" anticipating non-stop thrills and suspense will not have these expectations met. Rather this is a serious-minded drama that unravels a puzzle which leaves the audience (and the characters) questioning the nature of reality itself. As an intellectual exercise, I really liked this experience and for viewers that don't need everything spelled out--this is an investment well worth taking.
Made in 2009, "The Double Hour" is just now getting a North...
A Satisfying, Nail-Biting Psychological Thriller from Italy
Fans of Alfred Hitchcock and followers of the more recent "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" series, would likely be pleased with this nail-biting psychological thriller from Italy, which delivers many unexpected twists during its 96 minutes of running time.
If suspense isn't your cup of tea but you enjoy art films with non-linear and unpredictable plots, you'll probably end up drinking the whole pot of this satisfying brainteaser from newcomer director Giuseppe Capotondi.
"The Double Hour" is actually a love story between a lonely immigrant, Sonia (a chambermaid at a high-end hotel in Turin) and the also lonesome Guido, an ex-cop working as a security guard at an art dealer's estate. The two meet at a speed-dating event and just as they are beginning to fall in love, a crime happens, and their relationship is cut short.
But before that, during their first date, Guido looks at his watch, which marks 23:23, and he tells Sonia that it's a double hour and that...
THE DOUBLE HOUR Is A Bit Of A Double-cross
Here's the thing: would a movie like THE USUAL SUSPECTS work successfully as a mystery IF the audience knew who Keyser Soze was from the beginning as opposed to the ending? Would THE SIXTH SENSE have been as captivating if, half-way through, Bruce Willis confessed to the audience that he was a ghost? Or, for that matter, would Darth Vader's big reveal - "No, Luke, I am your father!" - have been as effective a surprise if the Sith Lord told you during THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK's opening crawl?
Of course, the answer is `no' to all of the above (unless you're a sadist), and therein lies a problem unique to this form of storytelling: when can a storyteller effectively reveal a film's big secret in order to achieve the greatest payoff for the audience? That said, THE DOUBLE HOUR gambles with its narrative structure - pulling the rug out from under the viewers when either they least expected it or were already peeking past the curtains on their own - and I found the results a...
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