Double Jeopardy

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

OBSESSION

Directed by BRIAN DE PALMA Screenplay by PAUL SCHRADER

They are discovered waltzing: Michael and Elizabeth Courtland, all wreathed in elegance, surrounded by admiring friends, a beautiful and blessed couple celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary. When the party is over they make their way upstairs, where their lovemaking seems certain to be as tastefully romantic as their party.

But there is a cry from their daughter's room. Elizabeth (Genevieve Bujold) goes to investigate and is absent too long. Michael (Cliff Robertson) follows to find his life suddenly shattered--wife and child kidnaped and a note demanding a huge ransom pinned to the bed. At times he is desperate, then hopeful. The police enlist his aid in a plot to outwit the kidnapers, assuring him that official expertise is a better guarantee of his family's safety than his fortune.

The police are wrong: the victims are apparently killed in the rescue attempt. For 15 years Michael is obsessed by guilt over his mistake in judgment, which renders him little better than a murderer in his own eyes.

Restoration Work. Then, on a business trip to Florence, he revisits the church where he first met his wife and, perched on a scaffolding at work on the restoration of a sacred painting, is her double (also played by Genevieve Bujold). He pursues her, brings her home to marry--and then she too is kidnaped in circumstances that precisely duplicate those of the first crime. There is even a message clipped to the post of the same bed, a photo of the original ransom note torn from an old newspaper.

Of course something more than chance is at work here. But the links between the two women in Courtland's life, and the two crimes against them, cannot be revealed without destroying the film's suspense.

What can be said is that Brian de Palma has made an exquisite entertainment that sends one back to Hitchcock, the masterly Vertigo in particular, for comparison. Obsession is a triumph of style over substance. Vilmos Zsigmond's camera, constantly on the move with a sinuous grace, is romantic in a manner seldom seen now in the movies. The late Bernard Herrmann's score, like the many he did for Hitchcock and Welles, is an instrument of flight, lifting the viewer up and over such resistance as he may have to the movie's patent improbability.

The film also throws into high melodramatic relief certain recognizable human truths: the shock of sudden loss, the panic of the effort to recoup, the mourning and guilt that blind the protagonist to a multitude of suspicious signs as he seeks expiation and a chance to relive his life. In a sense, the movie offers viewers the opportunity to do the same thing--by going back to a more romantic era of the cinema and the simple, touching pleasures denied the audience by the current antiromantic spirit of the movies.

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