Film review

Johan Grimonprez (2009)

All the archive material is absorbing per se – newsreel of political events during the Cold War, commercials for Folger’s instant coffee, clips from the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series, or from American TV news bulletins or Hitchcock movies or interviews with Hitchcock.  The same goes for the bits of Bernard Herrmann’s scores on the soundtrack.  It takes time to get your bearings and during that time the collage of material is beguiling.  We watch the impressionist Mark Perry listening to and practising the voice of Hitchcock, which he’s going to supply throughout the film.  (This is a shrewd move because Perry’s vocal mimicry is not that good – you get used to it but he has a vaguely sneering tone which lacks the original’s sense of humour.  Thinking of the artifice that we saw in preparation at the start condones Perry’s limitations.)  The Hitchcock voice describes a meeting with an older version of himself, on the set of The Birds in 1962:  the doppelgänger is a time traveller, arrived for the 1962 encounter from 29 April 1980, the day Hitchcock died.   The credits acknowledge that this meeting of doubles across the years is inspired by a Jose Luis Borges anecdote (called ‘25 August 1983’).  The double is a well-known trope in Hitchcock and the great man announces early here on that ‘… if you meet your double, you should kill him, or he will kill you’:  excerpts from his television work supply further and entertaining evidence of this preoccupation.  We also see, rather too often, a man called Ron Burrage, who’s a professional Hitchcock lookalike (there’s a clip of Burrage appearing with the star of The Birds, Tippi Hedren, at an event celebrating the centenary of Hitchcock’s birth in 1999). Interspersed with all this are excerpts from the spat between Khrushchev and Nixon at the 1959 US National Exhibition in Moscow, followed by the standard seminal moments of the next few years – the 1960 TV debates between Nixon and Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs debacle, the returning hero Yuri Gagarin, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Cuba missiles crisis, Dallas and the grassy knoll.   The whole thing is also punctuated by those adverts – a succession of condescending American husbands scold their wives for crap coffee before Folger’s saves the day.

The few reviews of Double Take that I’ve read are admiring but I didn’t much like this ‘docu-essay’, which seems to be a favoured way of categorising it.  The shape of the film becomes increasingly conventional and the selection of Cold War highlights increasingly predictable.  The ideas don’t come together in an interesting way:  by the closing stages, Johan Grimonprez seems to be straining merely to tie them up neatly.  We’re told that hardliners on both sides branded their leaders traitors when Kennedy and Khrushchev averted nuclear war in October 1962 – and that Brezhnev immediately began plotting to get rid of Khrushchev.  When the narrative announces that Khrushchev was eventually removed in October 1964 it seems meant to stress the inevitability of his departure although your natural reaction might be that Brezhnev took a fair time to achieve his objective.  The isn’t-that-spooky information that Hitchcock received an invitation to lunch at the White House in an envelope postmarked 21 November 1963 is naff.   The connection of Cold War tensions, the space race, malign aliens and the threat from the skies in The Birds seems far from original but what’s most irritating about Double Take is your sense that Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy, who wrote the script, know that perfectly well and might well be amused that anyone was square enough to take issue with it.

This is a film for cinéastes who, unlike me, don’t find its contrivances eclipsed by the newsreel footage – who see the archive material as supplementary to a piece about Hitchcock.   (The Belgian Grimonprez also made a short about him in 2005 called Looking for Alfred.)   Jonathan Romney’s review in The Independent is a good illustration of this point of view[1].  The Nixon-Khrushchev exchange, because I’d not seen it at this length before, is the dramatic highlight of Double Take.  You can’t help feeling sympathy for Nixon, arguing carefully but looking uncomfortable (his anxious shadow movements seem almost to prefigure the things that hindered his impact in the following year’s debates with Kennedy).  In contrast, Khrushchev talks rubbish charismatically.  The suggestion made by the visitor from 1980 that a new art form devours its progenitor – so that TV eats movies – is something that Hitchcock seems wryly aware of anyway, when he talks of how people are saying he’s prostituting himself by making Alfred Hitchcock Presents.   (Hitchcock is amusing in clips like this although Grimonprez comes to rely on him too exclusively for amusement.)    His alter ego explains to the younger Hitchcock the unhappy fate of cinema in the years between 1962 and 1980.  That doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think those years were some of the best in Hollywood’s history.

3 November 2010

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/double-take-johan-grimonprez-80-mins-12a-1935109.html