Alfred Hitchcock once claimed to have entered a Hitch look-alike contest and lost, characteristically making a joke out of a long-held private obsession. Doppelgängers, impersonators, imposters and victims of mistaken identity - innocent men wrongly presumed guilty - stalk his movies and television shows and now provide the inspiration for Double Take. Loosely based on a short story, August 25th, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges, it starts with the idea of the Master locked in a murderous mano a mano with his own double. "Two of you is one too many," as he puts it.
That alone would be a juicy premise for a movie and the director, Johan Grimonprez, toys with it awhile: Mark Perry narrates the film in a convincing approximation of Hitch's plummy tones and a key supporting character is the impersonator Ron Burrage (who to my eyes doesn't resemble Hitchcock at all).
But Double Take is vastly more ambitious, a sort of archive mash-up/ philosophical essay/ fey jeu d'esprit. The year is 1962. Hitchcock has diversified into television and a mosaic of highly entertaining clips show him introducing his shows with a stream of deadpan bons mots, mocking the dire Folgers coffee commercials which pay for them. He's also making The Birds (although Double Take is opening to coincide with the re-release of Psycho on Friday, its actual focus is this, Hitchcock's subsequent film) which was made against the backdrop of the space race, the Cuban missile crisis, the shooting of John F Kennedy and the irresistible rise of American paranoia.
Grimonprez makes some fairly jejune comparisons (of the sort which Hitch himself would smile at) between the avian attackers of The Birds and the Soviet threat from the skies. There's also a woolly leitmotif of doubling, which the film applies wholesale to just about everything and everybody: television is cinema's evil twin, capitalism mirrors communism and Nixon and Khrushchev (bald, portly: another lookalike?) are virtual blood brothers.
The whole thing adds up - as perhaps was intended - to what Hitchcock would describe as one giant MacGuffin. But if you accept that its arguments don't stack up and simply go with the flow, you'll find a fantastically well-researched and edited freeform evocation of an era. The yearning, haunting music, inspired by and incorporating the work of Hitchcock's regular composer, Bernard Herrmann, is a welcome bonus.
- Double Take opens in the UK on Friday.
- Find Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Daphne Du Maurier's original story on Amazon.
