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Suture
USA 1993
produced by Scott McGehee, David Siegel, Michèle Pétin (executive), Steven Soderbergh (executive) for Kino Korsakoff
directed by Scott McGehee, David Siegel
starring Dennis Haysbert, Mel Harris, Sab Shimono, Dina Merrill, Michael Harris, David Graf, Fran Ryan, John Ingle, Sanford Gibbons, Mark DeMichele, Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Capri Darling, Carol Kiernan, Laura Groppe, Mel Coleman, Lon Carli, Ann Van Wey, Sam Smiley, Seth Siegel, Vincent Barbi, Mark Siegel, Jack Rubens (voice)
written by Scott McGehee, David Siegel, music by Cary Berger, special effects makeup by Dave Ayres
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
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Construction worker Clay (Dennis Haysbert) and rich son Vincent
(Michael Harris) haven't met each other until their late 30s at the burial
of their mutual father, and they couldn't help but notice how much they
looked alike. Not long after, Vincent invites Clay over to his place, and
even though Clay insists he doesn't want any handouts or anything, Vincent
showers him with gifts, including a suit that matches his own, the
wristwatch of his father and the like ... and he secretly also replaces
Clay's driving license and bank cards with his own - only to later blow
him up in his own car, thus pretty much perfectly faking his own death.
Because you have to know here, Clay and Vincent's father has been
murdered, and every clue leads to Vincent - and he figures with himself
out of the way, he could make away with his inheritance somehow. The one
thing though is, Clay does survive, and his face, burnt to a crisp in the
explosion can be restored via plastic surgery ... but he's suffering from
amnesia, and the fact that he's told by everybody he's somebody else
doesn't help here. But he soon falls in love with his plastic surgeon (Mel
Harris), who feels the same way about him, and even if he doesn't remember
a thing (understandably), and all his dreams seem to point into a
different direction, as his psychoanalyst (Sab Shimono) points out, he
slowly fits into his role as Vincent - plus, due to the fact that he just
isn't he and his fingerprints are thus not Vincent's, the police
eventually lets him off the hook regarding his father's murder due to lack
of evidence, and thus before long Clay is what the real Vincent couldn't
even have hoped for - a free man! But now Vincent wants back his identity
... and hey, to get what he wants, Vincent has already not shied away from
killing his father, so doing away with the brother he hardly even knows
shouldn't be much of an issue, right? Ok, the main
"joke" of Suture is of course that its two lead
opponents, who emphasize their physical resemblance at every opportunity,
actually look nothing alike: Michael Harris is a scawny white dude,
Dennis Haysbert is a big black guy. It also has to be noted that the film
leaves hardly a genre cliché in its way untouched, and the simplified
version of Freudian psychoanalysis (including a psychoanalyst having his
office decorated in Rorschach-inkblots) used here is almost ridiculous,
while the carefully composed shots that make up the film are just too
artificial to come across as convincing ... and all of this makes the
movie beyond awesome! No really, you probably have never seen a movie
filled with as many clichés as Suture, but they're so well and so
knowingly employed, and while one might find irony in them, there's
certainly no post-modernist humour or even tongue-in-cheekness in there.
No, actually the film works pretty well as a film noir-ish thriller (also
thanks to its black-and-white cinematogaphy), even for the uninitiated -
but the better you know the genre and the mainstays, the more enjoyment
this will bring you!
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