The Double Hour is one of those insidious films that, somewhere around the mid-way point TWISTS. If you're a spectator like me who is especially interested in culpable heroines whose subjectivity is called into question--is she being haunted or is she crazy??--then this film serves up multiple satisfactions. I'm not saying that the equation of female subjectivity with pathology is not troubling; this cultural trope has been around for centuries as a way of representing longstanding cultural anxieties regarding women. Yet this film uses techniques that truly align the spectator with its main female protagonist, Sonia (Kseniya Rappaport), which renders the film's main male character, Guido (Filippo Timi) almost beside the point. He could be "Guy X." This film is all about Sonia, and not as your garden-variety femme fatale. Spoilers ahead.
Much of the film takes place in a hotel in Turin where Sonia works as a chambermaid. Early on, one of the hotel's guests appears to jump from a hotel balcony to her death while Sonia's cleaning her bathroom. The image of her body, lying many stories below, is framed poignantly from Sonia's POV (point-of view) as she looks from above; in fact, most of the film is through her viewpoint. She appears quiet, hardworking, and a little shy. As her fellow maid, Margherita, points out, Sonia seldom smiles. When we get glimpses of her spartan apartment, the space is as minimalist and impersonal as Sonia's demeanor, and the spectator receives little insight into her inner world. For now.
Sonia tries to open up her social life by attending a speed dating event run by the domineering matchmaker Marisa.
**I've never participated in speed dating, but it seems like it might be fun or utterly annoying. Fun because you meet a ton of people in a brief amount of time, and you have to rely on your first impressions or gut when it comes to an interest or attraction to one of them. Really annoying because you basically have to pitch your personal self quickly to someone else with a degree of sincerity, and that does not seem like an easy task.
Anyway, back to the film. Like so many representations of singles dating in films, this scenario is initially represented as pretty horrible. The film tosses blowhard, mama's boy, and creeper stereotypes at Sonia, who looks a little more defeated after every encounter. By the time Guido sits down at her table, she seems grateful that he's not some kind of total weirdo. He seems a little brusque, but admits that he's a long standing veteran of Marisa's events--just not a successful one unless you count cheap hook-ups. Sonia and he have one of those, and he kind of tosses her out afterward without giving her his number. The film stays with him after Sonia leaves, but only for a moment as he has a mini-tantrum and throws a bottle at the door after she departs. Why?? Not so sure. He's even more of a mystery than Sonia, but not in a very compelling way. Still, Marisa calls soon after to say that he's requested Sonia's number. She's psyched, and Margherita notices that Sonia's smiling more at work. Yippee (sarcastic undertone). Unfortunately, the tone of the film makes it clear that she will not be smiling for long.
On one of Sonia's days off, Guido picks her up at her apartment, and they zip off while "In Between Days" from The Cure's The Head on the Door album plays in the background.
**Suddenly I wondered, is this film taking place in the 80s? Then I realized, nah. Cellphones.
Turns out that Guido's a former cop who is now a security guard for a rich guy's uber-mansion in the middle of the woods somewhere in the Italian countryside. He takes his new girl to the manor, lets her listen to some nature sounds, and then turns off electronic security for the place so that they can walk, hand-in-hand, in the woods, unencumbered. Just as the two are settling down on a nice little leaf-covered knell, a gunman shows up and threatens both of them. They are captured by balaclava-wearing guys robbing the mansion, and they do a fine job of stripping it of its luxury accoutrements. The two of them are tied to columns while the robbers empty the place, and one's feverish mind starts to work overtime. Is Sonia in on it with these robbers? Is Guido? In classic cop-show fashion, Guido works to free his hands while one of the robbers threatens to sexually assault Sonia (yes, that tired cliche), and when he goes to save her, Guido's shot. Dead.
Now the film gets interesting, and not just because "Guy X" is no longer in the picture. Tragically, Sonia appears pretty devastated by this harrowing experience, and can barely function at her chambermaid job. She has a slight scar on her forehead (a la Harry Potter) where the bullet went through Guido and hit her. Still this physical scar is minor compared to the mental one she is carrying with her. She is more than haunted by her near death experience; she seems to be haunted by Guido as well. While she's preparing for a workday at the hotel, she sees Guido on a security monitor at the hotel's security station. She quickly runs to the place where he appeared, but no one's there. This investigation entails fantastic frenzied camerawork down a variety of hallways and stairwells. Another evening, while she's home alone, in the bath, every time she submerges her head underwater, she hears that pesky Cure song. She receives a phone call from Guido repeating her name. Is he alive? Yet she attended his funeral, the mass headed by this same damn priest that keeps popping up. Meanwhile, a cop friend of Guido's, Dante, is suspicious of Sonia's involvement in the earlier robbery, and harasses her at every turn. Is someone trying to gaslight her, or is Guido's spirit truly haunting her?
Events in the film continue to get weirder and weirder. Dante shows her a picture of her and Guido taken in Buenos Aires, yet Sonia has never been there and definitely not with Guido. Like the "surveillance footage" from before, and despite the film taking place at a time where technology can lie, Sonia holds this photographic image as evidence of some kind of truth. At home, the lights mysteriously flicker on and off, and her flashlight momentarily reveals Guido standing in the hallway. Freaked out, she runs to fellow chambermaid Margherita's home to stay the night. When she returns the following day, all the lights are blazing in her apartment and her flashlight is dead. Meanwhile, just to up the creepy quotient, a frequent guest at the hotel, Bruno, keeps following her around, defending her from rude guests and trying to finagle a date with her. Some kind of traveling salesman, Margherita makes an earlier suggestion that he's carrying around his dead wife in his ever present suitcase. One does not ever feel confident regarding what events are really happening, and what might be manifestations of Sonia's unraveling psyche.
Sonia's gaze and subjectivity are what truly gives the film narrative momentum and meaning. Even though her perceptions are confused and unreliable, the film assiduously keeps the spectator within Sonia's perspective, and so one identifies and sympathizes with her struggles, even when (SPOILER alert) it turns out that Sonia was involved in the robbery at the country mansion. Still, this piece of information does not arrive until the film's 49 minute mark, a little more than half way through the film. She ends up following one of the trucks she recalls seeing at the time of the robbery, with the film's narration suggesting that her curious investigation could be dangerous to her (since it's accompanied by tense music and framing). She thrusts open the door of the moving truck where one of the robbers sits, but instead of a violent showdown, the two passionately embrace. Nevertheless, Sonia exhibits hesitancy and remorse regarding this interaction, especially when her boyfriend, Riccardo, plans their escape to Argentina. Now, what initially seemed like incipient madness turns into a portrait of a woman haunted by guilt. Sonia has been punishing herself for what ostensibly became a robbery gone wrong, but the film implies that she had/has feelings for Guido, and is distinctly unwilling to let him go.
Her mental self-punishment culminates in two more acts of violence that are as unsettling as they are confusing, and speak to the film's disordered timeline. After a night on the town with Margherita, including shots and some drunk driving, Sonia returns to work to find her friend missing. Shortly afterward, her manager reveals that Margherita committed suicide by jumping to her death--oddly echoing the film's suicide at the beginning. Both characters tell Sonia, right before their deaths, that she looks better with her hair down (she wears it up for her chambermaid job). Yet, the film never gives any inkling that Sonia's feisty friend is remotely suicidal. Did Sonia kill her friend in some drunken bout of madness?? Sonia attends the funeral with Bruno, the creepy hotel guest, and overhears the priest say Sonia's name instead of Margherita's. Stranger and stranger. Bruno insists that she calm down, and offers her a ride home and a sip from his flask. He then tells her that funerals put him in a good mood! This line of dialogue, in almost any film, is a VERY BAD SIGN. And he whistles. Also a VERY BAD SIGN.
Sonia awakens in his car, alone, drugged and paralyzed. Taking its cues from an entirely different film, 1988's The Vanishing, Margherita's earlier suspicions regarding Bruno are validated, and he shows up with a giant plastic sheet--the better to wrap Sonia with...He drags her through the woods to a nice bucolic spot, visually similar to the one where Guido and Sonia had their fated "last date," drops her into a nice grave, and buries her alive. The last images one sees are of clumps of dirt falling from above from Sonia's POV. This scene, and those that came before, really highlight the type of force that guilt can become. Indeed, guilt can kill you. Except when it doesn't.
To jump to a side or related topic, before I get to my ultimate SPOILER, I've been watching a rather interesting show on NBC, entitled Awake. The show stars Jason Isaacs, who you might recognize from that terrific Masterpiece Mystery/British series "Case Histories" based on the Kate Atkinson mystery novels. He is a phenomenal actor, and has to be to carry off the series' cockamamie premise week after week. In summary, after hurtling down a ravine with his wife and teenage son in their car, police detective Michael Britten awakens to find himself living in two different realities. In one warmly-hued, golden one, his wife is alive and his son is dead; in the blue-tinted other reality, his son's alive and his wife's dead. Every time he goes to sleep he wakes up in the other reality. Helpfully, he has two different shrinks in each world who he is forced to meet with week after week, and who do not take kindly to his believing in the other respective reality. Oh, and the show's a police procedural, so the crimes he solves every week provide clues for each other in the alternate worlds. CRAZY!!! Granted, the British just do this kind of thing so much better and in smaller doses: See Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. (OMG, I just found out that the latter had 3 seasons! Must hunt them down!)
The main concern with Awake is how in the world the show can keep up this back and forth for an entire television season (12-24 episodes). Connected to that concern is the idea that the show's main character, Michael, might actually be in a COMA, and might be trying to work out how this accident happened (there are inklings that his female chief superintendent might be involved), and that BOTH his wife and son might still be alive. Ugh. My wish is that if this COMA is the case, then he awakes from it to find them both dead, and then really loses it, but my tastes run dark, dark, dark. These predilections also mean that I preferred The Double Hour to end with Sonia's completely random, dark, and twisted burial. I find those kinds of WTF endings immensely satisfying.
Instead, SPOILER, the next scene shows Sonia awakening from a COMA! And Guido's at her side. Yep, I know. Everything that happened, post-robbery, occurred in Sonia's delicate and deranged coma-state. While in most cases, this kind of plot twist would come off as so insulting, the fact that the entire film so far has been filtered through Sonia's perspective tempers that shift, and gives the rest of the film a degree of subtlety and nuance. Thankfully, unlike that ridiculous Regarding Henry from 1991, where getting shot in the head magically turns jerks into nice people, Sonia does not become a magical girlfriend who just loves Guido happily-ever-after, The End. In fact, my one qualm with the film is that during this final section of the film, viewers are forced into Guido's perspective for the first time, and this shift turns Sonia into the mysterious femme fatale that she was never meant to be. The fact that critics compare this film to Body Heat at all really emphasizes how much more comfortable (mostly male) critics are with identifying with male protagonists, even if they experience that subjectivity for barely twenty minutes of screen time.
Spectators still get insight and time with Sonia at film's end, but after spending so much time with her psychically, to suddenly see her through Guido's suspicious gaze is a bit of a let down. Especially since he is such a thin, one-dimensional character--Guy X. When she ultimately chooses to leave him behind and run off with her robber boyfriend, Riccardo, Guido witnesses her deception at the airport, and she sees Guido see her. He almost turns her in to the cops, but changes his mind, going back to his crappy job as a supermarket security guard, and attending Marisa's speed dating events once again. The film's final image is of Sonia and Riccardo in a photo identical to the one Dante presented to her earlier of Sonia and Guido in Buenos Aires, happy and smiling. Guy X has just been replaced with Guy Y, suggesting that this story was Sonia's all along. Sure, the film's twisty timeline and blurring of reality with coma "reality" beg for repeat viewings, but despite the film's noir-ish stylings, I believe our identification with and sympathy for Sonia never waver. This film is definitely worth checking out, even if I give away some of its twists.
