Obsession | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Obsession ***

by Eric Henderson on September 3, 2006 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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Geneviève Bujold was a little bit like the Björk of late '60s, early '70s cinema. She worked between predominately pop-minded American films and hermetic, aggressively Euro productions, coasted a long way on adorably pliable looks, and kept you perpetually off-balance with her off-kilter line-readings and interpretations. She was a sterile cuckoo with a voice whose grit confirmed the darkness in her eyes. Paul Schrader may have ended up having to capitulate Obsession's original (ridiculous) scripted ending to the will of Brian De Palma, but the casting of Bujold in what is essentially Kim Novak's role in Vertigo results in a literary emphasis not seen in De Palma's work again until the strong-arm showboating of Oliver Stone and David Mamet. Obsession is, as far as De Palma's tributes to Hitchcock go, half-baked and far-fetched without even the benefit of being audacious-unto-tasteless. It's the movie in which the only dearth of a metaphoric "double" is the comedy mask that ought to complement the dour visage of tragedy. (Is that the reason that it is Obsession, and not any other De Palma film up until Femme Fatale, that is included in the top 1,000 film list of that old sourpuss Jonathan Rosenbaum—the critic who sneered at the director for expressing delight at audience reaction to Dressed to Kill?) While Bernard Herrmann's rapturously funereal score (with at least four separate dirge leitmotifs swirling around the opulent, central "Valse Lente") ratchets up the film's metastasized, polluted doom-gloom, Bujold takes her role (a screenwriter's "pitch" if there ever was one—e.g. "What if we took the idea that Kim Novak was practically young enough to be James Stewart's daughter and just ran with that?") in the opposite direction, at least initially. Within minutes of meeting Cliff Robertson's sad sack, she bites heartily into Schrader's symbolic dialogue about the ethical implications of discovering an original draft of art and restoring the revision. It's clearly a bout of self-deprecating guilt from a writer who felt a little dirty turning Vertigo into a teary-eyed sick joke. But Bujold's enthusiasm as a performer redeems the entire picture, especially when she's asked to perform flashback scenes that shouldn't work but, thanks to her, represent another of De Palma's fearlessly experimental whims.

Director(s): Brian De Palma
Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cast: Cliff Robertson, Geneviève Bujold, John Lithgow, Sylvia Kuumba Williams, Wanda Blackman, J. Patrick McNamara, Stanley J. Reyes, Nick Kreiger, Stocker Fontelieu
Distributor: Ondine Productions
Runtime: 98 min.
Rating: PG
Year: 1976