OBSESSION (Brian de Palma, 1976)

Cliff Robertson plays Michael Courtland the businessman who loses his much-loved wife and daughter to kidnappers and is riven by guilt. When he goes to Florence with his business partner (John Lithgow) he meets a young woman who is the spitting image of his late wife and becomes obsessed, à la VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock,1958) a clear inspiration, following her through the dark nights of the old town until he meets her, dates her and brings her to America.

Good thing she’s a good Catholic and doesn’t put out, as the object of his affection turns out to be the daughter he’s long thought dead. Geneviève Bujold plays mother, daughter, and child-as-grown up, one of the many inventive twirls De Palma de ploys here.

She’s terrific and her work here makes me want to revisit her other work, particularly the films she made in Quebec with Paul Almond, Michel Brault and Claude Jutra. Robertson, as we can see in the clip below,  comes across as handsome but a bit stiff in contrast.

The story is filmed predominantly in very wide shots, that take in the surroundings, contrasted with close-ups, sometimes extreme ones, when the story calls for interiority or turns to dreams.

It’s a dazzling film full of rhyming shots (the mausoleum where the wife rests evokes the Church where they met, father and daughter are both filmed in the exact same place in the exact same type of shot at different moments in the film, the change in figure a change in meaning) with the last shot, a father/daughter embrace where  the camera goes 360 degrees on the impossible couple, themselves twirling with emotional release around the camera. It’s a tour de force ending to a fascinating film that as Gary Couzens says, ‘has both a 360° nd 540° pan’..

It was De Palma’s first mainstream success and Bernard Herrman’s last score (TAXI DRIVER was written later but released earlier),, a great one. Co-written by De Palman and Paul Schrader; the latter accusing the former of truncating and destroying his work (ostensibly removing or condensing the last third of the screenplay) and not speaking to him for years. But De Palma clearly made the right decision. It’s a noir infused psychological thriller with Gothic elements  that holds up beautifully, with the scenes of Robertson following the dream of his dead wife at night in Florence particularly memorable. The ending remains extraordinary. Bluray from Arrow.

José Arroyo