Sutura

Working class Clay travels into the city to meet his wealthy half-brother Vincent for the first time. Their shared father has just been killed. Shortly after Gus arrives, Vincent announces that he must fly out of town overnight and Gus drives him to the airport. On the drive back Vincent sets off a car bomb to kill Gus, however Gus survives despite being badly disfigured. Believing him to be Vincent the surgeons rebuild his face and try to bring his memories back. However Gus finds he is now accused of murder (as Vincent) and that he has only strange dreams about a possible past life.

I have seen this twice in an attempt to try and break into the deeper issues that it alludes to. I have not been totally successful but this not to say that I think this is a bad film. The plot involves the complexity of personality. I first watching it thinking it sounded like a good set-up for a thriller – if you think the same then you may be let down. The plot is more about how our personalities are formed – are we an ID picture, are we who we chose to be? The split personalities and the dual aspects of the plot are best seen in the casting of the two main roles. At first I thought it was a lazy art-house trick to cast a black and a white actor as `similar brothers' but the metaphor is used quite well.

The problem with the film is that the inner themes are not fully explained (pr at least I found them hard to reach fully). I know roughly what it was saying but I would find it very hard to explain. This means that if you can't get inside the plot you are left with what's on the surface and this isn't enough. It moves slowly and appears to go nowhere in particular. But focus on the bigger picture and this will give you something to think about even if it fails to grip you for the whole running time.

Haysbert is pretty good – if fact all the cast are OK bu they all seem to know they're in an arty movie. The result is that they talk slowly, say big meaningful sentences and stare into the distance regularly. What saves this film is the direction. The use of black and white is superb, the framing of every shot is interesting and I was honestly transfixed by the bleak beauty of every shot. Things that would have been ordinary in colour are fascinating in this bleak frame. On top of this the music is good too – lots of classic music gives a cold, unsure feel to the film but the use of `ring of fire' is brave and, happily, comes off.

Overall is this for everyone? No. Is it worth a try? Yes. On my second viewing I feel that it has layers I'm yet to understand and fully appreciate. The visual aspect of the film alone is worth a watch. Although I suspect that the plot is not as deep or as clever as it thinks it is, I know that there is plenty ot be discovered about this. Give it a shot – I did and now am about to go and give it a 3rd watch.

Brothers Vincent (rich playboy) and Clay (average construction worker) meet up for the first time after their father's funeral and remark on how similar they look. But unknown to Clay, who thinks his life is taking a turn for the better, Vince is actually plotting to kill him with a car bomb and pass the corpse off as his own, planning to start a new life elsewhere with his father's inheritance.

Before the script was even written, those involved were looking into identity, paranoia and amnesia, and drew strong influences from Hiroshi Teshigahara's "The Face of Another", "Seconds" and "Manchurian Candidate", among others. (One of the writer-directors almost pursued a PhD in Japanese film, actually.) Mix that in with the tropes and cinematography of film noir, and you have the birth of "Suture", a minor masterpiece that anticipates such films as "Memento" (which unfortunately have overshadowed this).

Being an independent film, the budget was low, and the production ironically benefited from the recent S&L crisis and scandals. Shooting in Phoenix, they found some buildings closed down, including a bank that became Vincent's palatial estate. This was fortuitous, as the space works perfectly (I would never have known it wasn't an actual mansion.) Other corners were cut in more clever ways... watch close to see how they afforded blowing up a car -- they use an almost Troma-esque maneuver.

There seems to be a deeper message in the writing, with an obvious nod to Descartes, and a psychiatrist who seems overly reliant on quoting Freud. I am not sure what I missed. But you have to love the brilliance of the casting. Maybe I am a little bit daft, but it took me forever to get past the two brothers looking identical... while looking nothing alike. That was a purely genius move. (Not surprisingly, producers balked at the film's central "conceit" and their insistence of filming in black and white... this could easily have ruined some careers.)

The Arrow Video release is packed with goodies. Not only does it have the full-length audio commentary (with no less a person than Steven Soderbergh), but we have a 30-minute behind-the-scenes series of interviews with just about everyone. We have deleted scenes. And, perhaps best of all, we have "Birds Past", a short film from the directors that has very rarely been seen anywhere. This is a must-own film, and for true film geeks, you will want to listen to the commentary: there is as much discussion about this film as there is about film-making in general, with plenty of stories about "sex, lies and videotape", Terrance Malick, and more.

Suture is a wry, if overly self-conscious, and relatively amusing rumination on race, subjectivity (of the Cartesian variety, and its attendant mind-body dualism), class mobility, and perhaps to a lesser extent, the American criminal justice system.

Comparisons to Hitchcock are misguided, as Suture better resembles, if pays homage to, John Frankenheimer's classic Seconds (1966). Yet whereas the latter explores fickle desire as constitutive of subjectivity as its protagonist transforms from beleaguered banker to artist playboy (a lateral move in terms of class), Suture considers subjectivity's more social aspects. It plays with filmic conventions such as black-and-white imagery and period costumes and scenery as denoting the past, while providing us with the central conceit of a race-blind society (mirroring perhaps our 'post-racial' one?) The difficulty or discomforting level of dissonance required to accept the film's premise, and the implications such a conceit has for the film's characters, is perhaps itself the 'message' of the film.

I'd recommend a triple feature, watching first Seconds, then Suture, then the documentary 13th.

The debut feature of US filmmaker-duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel is a pristine-looking psychological forensics of an individual's confused identity, shot in widescreen black-and-white cinematography, SUTURE has its unmissable neo-noir panache awash but also undeniably undercut by its slight story-telling stratagem.

McGehee-Siegel's conceit is surprising and madcap, the purportedly identical half-brothers Vincent Towers (a dour-looking Harris) and Clay Arling (Haysbert) are diametrically different in their appearances (the racial distinction strikes as a self-aware but caustic jape), which at once impels viewers to suspend our disbelief and blatantly dissociates its scenario from any pretension of realism, as if to declare in its opening: don't trust what you've seen.

Truly, what we see is a rather simple identity-swapping scheme goes amiss, after murdering his minted father, Vincent plots to liquidate Clay, his doppelganger half-brother, whose existence is conveniently sealed from the outside, thus Clay would be the whipping boy passing off as Vincent, guilty and perished, then the real Vincent can return as Clay to claim his munificent inheritance. The plan is seamless a priori, but miraculously Clay survives the car comb and ends up with a disfigured visage and severe amnesia. Treated by Dr. Renee Descartes (Harris) to reconstruct his face, now believing he is Vincent, Clay's memory has to take a longer divagation to recover his true identity under the psychoanalysis of Dr. Max Shinoda (Shimono), who is welded together with the image of Rorschach test and passes wisdom in shrink's parlance by rote, and it goes without saying, the real Vincent will not have Clay usurping his heirdom for too long, danger and myth (for instance, what is the ulterior motive of Vincent's recently widowed mother Alice Jameson, played by an elegantly dressed, seemingly benignant Dina Merrill?) are hovering like dark cumuli, and the film's ending sternly keeps the lid on its barbed irony of Clay's ultimate choice.

In lieu of salting the plot, McGehee-Siegel duo resolves to making the mark of their cinematic style with their puny budget ($900,000). Potentially intensified by the sagacious choice of monochrome, the film emanates a beguiling retro-experimental flair with its punctiliously arranged compositions, high contrasted lighting and shades (inside the post-modern edifice equipped with bed-sheet- covered furniture and unadorned walls functioning as Vincent's clinical abode) and jumpy montages.

Another boon to this glossy debut is Dennis Haysbert, a straight-up leading man material endowed with virility, sensibility and fine fettle, who totally has it in him to rival Denzel Washington's prominent status in Hollywood only if we were living in a world of justice, and SUTURE, at any rate, is the bona-fides of the overlooked standing of McGehee-Siegel's oeuvre.

A masterpiece of black and white Cinemascope, a brilliant use of the format. Every frame is beautifully composed with meticulous production design and art direction. It is so stylized that perhaps only ardent cinephiles can really appreciate it.

The story is about a rich murderer who discovers that he has a long lost brother who looks so much like him that, if he is killed by a car bomb (in the murderer's car, in his clothes, carrying his identification), nobody will guess it isn't the murderer. The innocent brother is so poor and naive that he allows himself to be set up, but, instead of dying, he survives with a smashed face and no memory.

The justification for this implausible setup is the opportunity to explore the idea of identity by positing an amnesia patient who is fitted with a very different person's face and past. If this story had been told in a conventional way with color, a narrower screen size, realistic rather than stylized acting, and the casting of two actors who looked very similar, it would have made a reasonably interesting thriller.

The brilliance lies in the artifice, especially in casting the wonderful Dennis Haysbert in a role written for his directly opposite physical type. The filmmakers seem to expect the audience to be able to watch the movie on more than one level. The story allows the audience to consider the obvious questions about the nature of identity, but the stylization allows the audience to consider the different questions about the nature of the film experience.