The Double Hour

Brian De Palma’s Blow Out lives. Not just in the new Criterion DVD, but when Giuseppe Capotondi explains his debut feature, The Double Hour. He references the giallo, the Italian horror and thriller film genre practiced by Mario Bava and Dario Argento. But it’s obvious from the subtly expressive acting and a very specific plot point that The Double Hour is primarily a tribute to De Palma.

When this romantic mystery-thriller is most direct about Slovak immigrant Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) falling in love with ex-cop Guido (Filippo Timi), Capotondi details their interaction with the kind of emotional intensity that De Palma matured into, especially with his late masterpieces Dressed to Kill, Raising Cain, Femme Fatale and Blow Out (restored this week to its visual splendor in a new Criterion DVD and screening April 13 at BAM as part of the De Palma Suspense series). Only the red herrings about Sonia’s guilty memories and confused (possibly neurotic P.O.V.) come from the giallo: trite, convoluted stuff.

It’s when Guido, nestled in his lair of surveillance equipment, secretive about his romantic past, yet reaching out to Sonia by demonstrating his super-snooper shotgun mic, that Capotondi reveals his Palmamania. A superficial view of Blow Out would limit its story to the thriller genre and unwisely read perversity or nihilism in it. Capotondi sensitively—helpfully— understands Blow Out in terms of De Palma’s desperate romantic, if tragic, outpouring. During The Double Hour’s climax—which brings together Guido and Sonia’s paired fates—Rappoport and Timi (who memorably portrayed Mussolini in Marco Bellocchio’s great Vincere) display some of the same complex passion as Blow Out’s John Travolta and Nancy Allen.

Only when Capotondi trades in chaos and negativity does he show a giallo streak—unfortunately that’s for most of the film. He lacks De Palma’s operatic extravagance, a legacy from Minnelli that, in Blow Out’s ending, moved De Palma to pay homage to Minnelli’s 1958 film, Some Came Running. Re-seeing Blow Out adds to the emotional tension between Timi and Rapoport, making it play like a re-imagining of what Blow Out might have been.

>>The Double Hour

Directed by Giuseppe Capotondi 

At Lincoln Plaza & Sunshine cinemas 

Runtime: 95 min.