Body Double (18.)
Directed by Brian De Palma. 1984
Starring Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry, Deborah Shelton, and Dennis Franz. 111 mins.
With beautiful, but presumably inadvertent timing the discerning movie streaming service MUBI is running De Palma's most notorious thriller Body Double, just as it was announced that De Palma is going to make a film about Harvey Weinstein. De Palma on Weinstein, tis a car crash devoutly to be wished for, like Boris and one of his bicycles lying crushed beneath the burning wreckage of lorry loaded full of Rolf Harris jail cell paintings.
Brian De Palma has spent half a century making films that annoy and exasperate people, bobbing about between lowish budget thrillers and big budget blockbusters. And in all that time, and out of all those films, I'd say Body Double is his most aggravating.
This is partly because of its place in his filmography. In the 80s he was at his peak. Prior to this, he had made Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Scarface. The hype and expectation for it were massive. It was made out to be the first coming of Basic Instinct, with promises about how it was going to be the most erotic film Hollywood had made, with real sex, and porn stars, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. In the end, we only got Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
Brian De Palma is in some ways a Hollywood equivalent of Jean Luc Godard – a master moviemaker who rarely translates that talent into audience enjoyment. With Godard it is deliberate and contrary, with De Palma it is a failing and a frustration. He doesn't get why we don't get it. But he is a filmmaker who consistently fails to fulfil his side of the bargain with the audience: to give us what we want but not make us look too craven for wanting it.
Body Double is another of his Hitchcock homages, with the plot liberally borrowing from both Vertigo and Rear Window. (It's also inspired by the shower sequence in Dressed to Kill where he had to use a body double for Angie Dickinson.) Craig Wasson is a jobbing Hollywood actor, down on his luck, who ends up housesitting in a luxurious pad off Mulholland Drive, and becomes fascinated with a girl who does an erotic dance every night in a property he overlooks. Through his voyeurism, he comes to believe she is in danger.
The lesson De Palma took from Hitchcock is that plot logic doesn't really matter as long as you have a series of big entertaining set pieces. Which is true, but the important part is not to be too obvious about it. Martin Amis wrote a really negative piece on De Palma, included in the Moronic Inferno, and his description of John Self in Money as a filmmaker who had five or six sequences in his head who just needed a scriptwriter to get him from one to another, is surely BDP. Dressed to Kill and Blow Out do not bear close, or even medium range, examination but they have such audacious sequences that they get away with it. In Body Double though he really makes a point of showing us how thoroughly ridiculous it all is. Fans and theorists interpret this as knowing and clever; audiences take it as an insult.
Many films have stories that fall apart when you think about them afterwards; in Body Double, you fall apart if you try to think about the story. You can drive yourself crazy trying to work out how to deal with a movie that is all hole and no plot. Spoilers, the most wildly implausible aspects of the film include: a protagonist who gets claustrophobic in a generously proportioned subway (but not in a lift); a strangler who nods off halfway through strangling someone; a murder attempt in the front seat of the car in a traffic jam as the police marshal drivers past an accident; a seduction sequence that is clearly all in a character’s head because of the swirling camera and fake backdrops that then turns out to be “real.”
Of course, such objections make you look like a terrible pedant in the eyes of the believers. I've always had difficulties going along with De Palma's thrillers (though Dressed to Kill is a revered film in my eyes) but I never could resist one of his great set pieces. The moment when you notice that the camera is on the move and there is a large area to explore is always a great rush – the train station shootouts in Untouchables and Carlito's Way, the art gallery seduction in Dressed to Kill, the opening 17 minutes of Snake Eyes.
And that's the real killer: you never get that rush in Body Double because the five or six big sequences just aren't that special, and aren't nearly good enough to justify the silliness. He's found some interesting LA locations to take his camera for a walk through, but there is no tension or excitement to them. And it doesn't have the usual lush, glossy visuals. It looks as flat and drab as the straight to video thrillers of that period which it is to some degree parodying. Even Pino Donaggio's splendid music doesn't really work with the visuals.
MUBI is streaming it as part of a De Palma double bill, with Raising Cain, which would be a better bet in my eyes. MUBI is a one in/ one out, on demand film streaming service which offers access to 31 careful selected titles, mixing classics, cult, arthouse and indie. Every day one drops out and a new film takes its place. There seems to be a 7-day free trial offer around at the moment. Body Double is available until July 2nd.
Directed by Brian De Palma. 1984
Starring Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry, Deborah Shelton, and Dennis Franz. 111 mins.
With beautiful, but presumably inadvertent timing the discerning movie streaming service MUBI is running De Palma's most notorious thriller Body Double, just as it was announced that De Palma is going to make a film about Harvey Weinstein. De Palma on Weinstein, tis a car crash devoutly to be wished for, like Boris and one of his bicycles lying crushed beneath the burning wreckage of lorry loaded full of Rolf Harris jail cell paintings.
Brian De Palma has spent half a century making films that annoy and exasperate people, bobbing about between lowish budget thrillers and big budget blockbusters. And in all that time, and out of all those films, I'd say Body Double is his most aggravating.
This is partly because of its place in his filmography. In the 80s he was at his peak. Prior to this, he had made Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Scarface. The hype and expectation for it were massive. It was made out to be the first coming of Basic Instinct, with promises about how it was going to be the most erotic film Hollywood had made, with real sex, and porn stars, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. In the end, we only got Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
Brian De Palma is in some ways a Hollywood equivalent of Jean Luc Godard – a master moviemaker who rarely translates that talent into audience enjoyment. With Godard it is deliberate and contrary, with De Palma it is a failing and a frustration. He doesn't get why we don't get it. But he is a filmmaker who consistently fails to fulfil his side of the bargain with the audience: to give us what we want but not make us look too craven for wanting it.
Body Double is another of his Hitchcock homages, with the plot liberally borrowing from both Vertigo and Rear Window. (It's also inspired by the shower sequence in Dressed to Kill where he had to use a body double for Angie Dickinson.) Craig Wasson is a jobbing Hollywood actor, down on his luck, who ends up housesitting in a luxurious pad off Mulholland Drive, and becomes fascinated with a girl who does an erotic dance every night in a property he overlooks. Through his voyeurism, he comes to believe she is in danger.
The lesson De Palma took from Hitchcock is that plot logic doesn't really matter as long as you have a series of big entertaining set pieces. Which is true, but the important part is not to be too obvious about it. Martin Amis wrote a really negative piece on De Palma, included in the Moronic Inferno, and his description of John Self in Money as a filmmaker who had five or six sequences in his head who just needed a scriptwriter to get him from one to another, is surely BDP. Dressed to Kill and Blow Out do not bear close, or even medium range, examination but they have such audacious sequences that they get away with it. In Body Double though he really makes a point of showing us how thoroughly ridiculous it all is. Fans and theorists interpret this as knowing and clever; audiences take it as an insult.
Many films have stories that fall apart when you think about them afterwards; in Body Double, you fall apart if you try to think about the story. You can drive yourself crazy trying to work out how to deal with a movie that is all hole and no plot. Spoilers, the most wildly implausible aspects of the film include: a protagonist who gets claustrophobic in a generously proportioned subway (but not in a lift); a strangler who nods off halfway through strangling someone; a murder attempt in the front seat of the car in a traffic jam as the police marshal drivers past an accident; a seduction sequence that is clearly all in a character’s head because of the swirling camera and fake backdrops that then turns out to be “real.”
Of course, such objections make you look like a terrible pedant in the eyes of the believers. I've always had difficulties going along with De Palma's thrillers (though Dressed to Kill is a revered film in my eyes) but I never could resist one of his great set pieces. The moment when you notice that the camera is on the move and there is a large area to explore is always a great rush – the train station shootouts in Untouchables and Carlito's Way, the art gallery seduction in Dressed to Kill, the opening 17 minutes of Snake Eyes.
And that's the real killer: you never get that rush in Body Double because the five or six big sequences just aren't that special, and aren't nearly good enough to justify the silliness. He's found some interesting LA locations to take his camera for a walk through, but there is no tension or excitement to them. And it doesn't have the usual lush, glossy visuals. It looks as flat and drab as the straight to video thrillers of that period which it is to some degree parodying. Even Pino Donaggio's splendid music doesn't really work with the visuals.
MUBI is streaming it as part of a De Palma double bill, with Raising Cain, which would be a better bet in my eyes. MUBI is a one in/ one out, on demand film streaming service which offers access to 31 careful selected titles, mixing classics, cult, arthouse and indie. Every day one drops out and a new film takes its place. There seems to be a 7-day free trial offer around at the moment. Body Double is available until July 2nd.
