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OBSESSION
1976
DIRECTED BY BRIAN DePALMA
8:00 PM UNIVERSITY THEATER
(98 minutes.) Director: Brian
DePalma. Story by: Brian DePalma; Screenplay by Paul Schrader.
Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond. Editor: Paul Hirsch. Music: Bernard
Hermann. Starring: Cliff Robertson, Genevieve Bujold, Jon Lithgow..
In the career of director Brian DePalma, Obsession marks a transition from the giddy, countercultural romps that dominate his early career -- Greetings (1968), Hi, Mom (1970) Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972) and The Phantom of the Paradise (1974)-- and the wicked thrillmaster phase which became his brand-name trademark after Carrie (also 1976). There’d been a strong hint of DePalma’s gleeful twistedness in Sisters (1973), but Obsession is the film where his itch to learn from Hitchcock and if possible surpass the master breaks most freely into the open.
The story has a Vertigo
like theme. As happened to the suffering detective in that film, the
protagonist in this case, a New Orleans architect (Cliff Robertson) is
eager to recreate a long ago lost love (Genevieve Bujold) when he
chances across her lookalike (Bujold, again), years later, on a working
trip to Italy. As scripted by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver),
from a story by DePalma, we know something our hero doesn’t -- which is
that his little daughter, whom he believes died with his beloved wife
during a botched kidnapping, years ago, very possibly did not die.
Indeed, this young Italian beauty he’s loves so instinctively may well
be none other.
As I say, we know this, or can
guess it at a fingersnap, he doesn’t. This irony permits engaging
tensions (if not very complex ones) and in any case allows our artist
in residence Vilmos Zsigmond, to try daring, unprecedented things,
foremost among which is that whirling final shot, which -- along with
the look on Cliff Robertson’s face -- is the image which abides.
