Giuseppe Capotondi's The Double Hour suggests an erotic, playful, but far less assured variation on the heady experiential labyrinth that Adrian Lyne sent Tim Robbins through in his excellent 1990 meta-thriller Jacob's Ladder. Lyne's film, now something of a cult classic, thrust us headfirst into a gloomy New York augmented by demonic visions, ghosts and familiar faces recast as rueful strangers and gleefully neglected to give the viewer a moment to get their bearings. The setting has changed from the Big Apple to Turin but the central segment of Capotondi's debut plays as a similarly disorienting dreamscape full of dead people, past lives, and deeply held secrets.
As the film begins, however, things are grimly unremarkable. Sonia (Kseniya Rappoport) delivers towels, makes beds, and scrubs down bathrooms at a swank hotel, giving her a chance to gossip with her happily promiscuous girlfriend (Antonia Truppo). Early on, she witnesses a suicide in one of the rooms but even that seems like viable option when she considers the men she encounters while speed-dating. It is during one of her luckier rounds that she hits it off with Guido (Filippo Timi, who made for a thunderous Mussolini in Marco Bellocchio's Vincere), an ex-cop who has taken a security and surveillance gig for a wealthy land owner and art collector's mansion. Attempting to impress Sonia with a look at the bucolic environs, Guido goes in for a kiss at the same moment that a group of thieves decide to hit the mansion, tying both of them up and threatening to rape Sonia.
We hear a gunshot, and the film cuts to a few weeks later, where Sonia has apprehensively returned to work after attending Guido's funeral. Her world is somber but seemingly has reached equilibrium when things are thrown back into disarray when she thinks she sees Guido in a length of surveillance video at work. Suddenly, she is seeing him everywhere, her friends and favored residents are acting strange, random noises emanate around her, ghosts are cuddling with her, a photo of Guido and her in Buenos Aires that was never taken appears and a familiar priest seems to be following her. By the time her girlfriend commits suicide, Sonia is at her wit's end. And then it gets even weirder.
The Cure's "In Between Days" factors into this paranoid alternate reality as well, and like the title of the film, it points to Capotondi and editor Guido Notari's playful and fascinating interest with time. Gaps in time are most notable during the film's major transitions, but they appear elsewhere as well, making for a nimble, disorienting sense of form that is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. From the outset, it seems like a trick contorting an otherwise suitably odd romance, but it ends up weaving beautifully with the ghostly narrative by the end of the film.
As much as Capotondi, working from a script by Alessandro Fabbri, Stefano Sardo, and Ludovica Rampoldi, shows major promise in terms of both composition and tone, he falters in the film's final third, feeling the need to lean on exposition and certainty whereas the preceding events were largely shrouded in ambiguity. (In this and only this, the film slightly earns its otherwise ridiculous comparisons to Christopher Nolan's Inception.) The Double Hour is mercifully anchored by the two lead performances, however, and even when things start taking a turn for the conventional, there is inherent mystery in Rappoport and Timi's eyes that keeps things interesting. In a great early scene, they share a joint by the river's edge while Sonia explains to him how she's never really felt like she's had a home, that she's always felt displaced. Capotondi hasn't fully succeeded in providing a full-tilt head-trip but he has, in the very least, distorted the familiar and made the disorientation palpable.
AKA La doppia ora.
As the film begins, however, things are grimly unremarkable. Sonia (Kseniya Rappoport) delivers towels, makes beds, and scrubs down bathrooms at a swank hotel, giving her a chance to gossip with her happily promiscuous girlfriend (Antonia Truppo). Early on, she witnesses a suicide in one of the rooms but even that seems like viable option when she considers the men she encounters while speed-dating. It is during one of her luckier rounds that she hits it off with Guido (Filippo Timi, who made for a thunderous Mussolini in Marco Bellocchio's Vincere), an ex-cop who has taken a security and surveillance gig for a wealthy land owner and art collector's mansion. Attempting to impress Sonia with a look at the bucolic environs, Guido goes in for a kiss at the same moment that a group of thieves decide to hit the mansion, tying both of them up and threatening to rape Sonia.
We hear a gunshot, and the film cuts to a few weeks later, where Sonia has apprehensively returned to work after attending Guido's funeral. Her world is somber but seemingly has reached equilibrium when things are thrown back into disarray when she thinks she sees Guido in a length of surveillance video at work. Suddenly, she is seeing him everywhere, her friends and favored residents are acting strange, random noises emanate around her, ghosts are cuddling with her, a photo of Guido and her in Buenos Aires that was never taken appears and a familiar priest seems to be following her. By the time her girlfriend commits suicide, Sonia is at her wit's end. And then it gets even weirder.
The Cure's "In Between Days" factors into this paranoid alternate reality as well, and like the title of the film, it points to Capotondi and editor Guido Notari's playful and fascinating interest with time. Gaps in time are most notable during the film's major transitions, but they appear elsewhere as well, making for a nimble, disorienting sense of form that is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. From the outset, it seems like a trick contorting an otherwise suitably odd romance, but it ends up weaving beautifully with the ghostly narrative by the end of the film.
As much as Capotondi, working from a script by Alessandro Fabbri, Stefano Sardo, and Ludovica Rampoldi, shows major promise in terms of both composition and tone, he falters in the film's final third, feeling the need to lean on exposition and certainty whereas the preceding events were largely shrouded in ambiguity. (In this and only this, the film slightly earns its otherwise ridiculous comparisons to Christopher Nolan's Inception.) The Double Hour is mercifully anchored by the two lead performances, however, and even when things start taking a turn for the conventional, there is inherent mystery in Rappoport and Timi's eyes that keeps things interesting. In a great early scene, they share a joint by the river's edge while Sonia explains to him how she's never really felt like she's had a home, that she's always felt displaced. Capotondi hasn't fully succeeded in providing a full-tilt head-trip but he has, in the very least, distorted the familiar and made the disorientation palpable.
AKA La doppia ora.
