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MovieMail's Review
Part mock-documentary, part conceptual art, this brilliant tale of paranoia and mystery, constructed from archive footage and newly-shot scenes, sees Hitchcock assailed by his double. And what's that under the table, asks Mike McCahill?
There’s only one Alfred Hitchcock, right? Not according to this supremely intriguing collaboration between Belgian collagist Johan Grimonprez and British writer Tom McCarthy. Both historical supposition and testament to the enduring fascination of the Master’s work, Double Take posits that, while filming The Birds in 1962, Hitchcock encountered a doppelgänger who claimed to have arrived from 1980 - the eve of another Presidential assassination attempt - with a grim vision of the future. And no, he doesn’t just mean the remake of The Lady Vanishes.
Grimonprez illustrates this tale with clips drawn from Hitchcock’s promotional and TV appearances, and filmed inserts featuring the voice of Dead Ringers’ Mark Perry and the portly figure of recently deceased Hitch ringer Ron Burrage, a former Claridge’s busboy turned professional Hitchcock lookalike. This is, then, both a story in itself, and a film about the stories we have been, and are being, told - one that reaches out beyond cinema history to history itself.
Interwoven throughout Double Take is an account of the Cold War, from the forced levity of the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen debates to the televised announcement of JFK’s death. The film describes a world on tenterhooks, expecting the worst; Hitchcock’s direct contribution is his famous definition of the difference between surprise and suspense, depending on the audience’s awareness of the bomb sitting under a restaurant table. There’s something of our own Adam Curtis in this skilled deployment of archive footage: in Grimonprez’s hands, The Birds becomes an augury of things to come.
The Hitchcock of 1980 is convinced that commercial-riddled television, the enemy of sustained suspense, has rendered his cinematic project worthless. He needn’t have worried, of course: those master manipulators preying on our most irrational fears continue to gather across the media like ravens on a climbing frame. If the title of Grimonprez’s film speaks to a reaction of disbelief, the content grasps how much of modern life is reliant on our credulity as consumers. Double Take’s pointed and provocative thesis is that a bomb now sits under all our tables - stay tuned through the end credits for more.
An ingenious hybrid, Double Take is part mock-documentary, part conceptual experiment by Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez that posits Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor unwittingly caught up in the cold war. Using archive TV and newsreel material, classic footage from his films, and newly shot scenes, Double Take constructs a new tale of paranoia and mystery that uses Hitchcock's own sardonic wit to explore his preoccupation with doubles - a recurring theme in his films - to virtuoso and entertaining effect.
Universal Studios California, 1962. Alfred Hitchcock, on the set of The Birds, is called to the production office for an urgent message. When he arrives, he's shocked to be confronted by his doppelganger, claiming to be the real Alfred Hitchcock and who declares: 'If you meet your double, you should kill him. Or he will kill you. Two of you is one too many. By the end of the script, one of you must die'.
