28 SEPTEMBER 1985, Page 34

Cinema

Body Double (`18', selected cinemas)

Bright lights, bright people

Peter Ackroyd

Brian De Palma is both one of the most fascinating and most vulgar of American directors — and in that paradox we may see why he poses such problems for critics, if not necessarily for audiences. He is slick, he is cheap but of his filmic skills there can be no doubt; and the fact that he manages to be both so tawdry and so interesting might suggest that the cinema itself is a medium which encourages or even wel- comes the meretricious imagination.

Let us take this particular film: Body Double is concerned with salacious sexual- ity and brutal murder (the latter with an electric drill); it has elements of soft-core pornography, of the 'horror film' and of any cheap detective series. And yet at the same time it is beautifully and on occasions astonishingly directed. An unemployed actor becomes obsessed with a young woman who lives in the apartment oppo- site his own; he follows her, convinced that she is in danger, and then later witnesses her murder. The rest may be left to the imagination of anyone who has not seen Rear Window. Those with beady little eyes may even be able to anticipate the denoue- ment but that does not lessen its interest, since Body Double is in some ways a triumph of manner over matter.

Like other directors of his generation De Palma has grown up with cinematic ima- gery, and he is now so familiar with its resources that he can deploy it in any number of ways. It is natural, then, that Body Double should open in a film studio where a conventional 'horror film' is being made and that its credits should roll across scenery which is seen to be only a piece of scenery when it is removed. It is suitable, also, that the story should be set in Hollywood, where the extraordinary theat- ricality of the urban environment matches that peculiar over-brightness which De Palma always brings to the screen. He has often been compared to Hitchcock, and it is certainly true that he borrows certain effects (and even, on this occasion, a plot) from him; but their true similarity lies in the fact that both men have entirely cinematic imaginations. De Palma's is not a literary or theatrical talent put to work in a different medium: he thinks in images, he feels in images, and as a result one of the most noticeable aspects of this film is the studied absence of dialogue in the more important scenes. He resembles Hitch- cock, too, in the way that he manages to orchestrate imagery in order to create an atmosphere of quite unbearable suspense even when, in fact, there seems to be nothing in particular to be suspenseful about.

He always has his eye on the audience, in other words, and he is just as busy manipulating the response in the stalls as he is in manipulating the actors in front of the camera — incidentally, De Palma is well served by his performers here, who are not in themselves 'stars' (everyone is subjugated to De Palma's vision) but who attain a very high standard of professional- ism. I do not know how De Palma prepares his films, but I suspect that — again, like Hitchcock — he has very clear ideas about what he wants and very firm means of attaining it. It is in fact not easy to describe the precise nature of his direction; there are no literary or theatrical allusions which would help to elucidate the particular tone of his films and perhaps the fullest explana- tion would be a technical one. It is largely through his remarkable and fluid use of the camera, for example, that he is on occa- sions able to sustain the momentum of a scene so that we have the illusion that it was all taken in one shot. It seems effort- less, almost, but it is a triumph (if nothing else) of editing. One of his favourite tricks — so familiar that it has now become almost the hallmark of his style -- is that of the camera circling around a character or group of characters so that they become the only recognisable objects in a shifting landscape. In this film he even re-employs the technique as a self-conscious joke which, in a film always veering close to a parody of itself, is not out of place.

And, in addition, all of De Palma's usual themes are here — perverse sex, violence, horror and, most importantly, the nature of voyeurism. In this case the actor who watches the murder is aligned with the murderer himself — 'your blood brother', as the investigating detective put it. De Palma is always half-entertaining and half- abusing his audience with reminders of its own voyeuristic status, and in Body Dou- ble he makes the explicit connection be- tween visual pornography and sex crimes, between the re-enactment of death and the responsibility of those who are content to watch it. Whether in fact he has anything very profound to say about these matters must remain in doubt (I think his is the position of the waiter who is quite proud to point to the fly in the soup which he is serving you), but there is no doubt that his power over the audience is very strong. It may not go very deep but it stretches very far — although it has to be said that those who have not grasped the fact that De Palma works in images rather than realities may have some problems with an ending which pays no obeisances to 'real life' at all.