The Double Hour is a movie about... well, about doubles. Boom! The title comes from the moment when the hour on a digital clock match the minutes (10:10, say). At these times there is some magic in the air and there is a suggestion of an alternate world - a parallel world to ours (though not as elegant as the Double Life of Veronique).
In the film, Sonia (Kseniya Rappaport) is an Eastern European immigrant maid working in a hotel in Turin. One night she goes to a speed dating event and meets Guido (Fillippo Timi) a widower who is working through the pain in his life by dating (and fucking) as many women as he can. There is an instant connection between the two of them as they are both trying to escape their pasts and enjoy the romance and eroticism of the other's company.
One day, on a date to Guido's work as a surveillance security guard, they are caught up in robbery that goes wrong. It seems to us that Guido is killed and Sonia survives, but in this world of doubles, things aren't always what they seem.
Director Guiseppe Capotondi is anything but subtle with the double imagery and motifs. Guido's deceased wife looks just like Sonia (as does one of the women he's screwing at the beginning of the film), leading us to make constant double takes (get it?!) and question who we are seeing at any given moment. There are a lot of mirrors throughout (an easy thing to put on screen when Sonia's work involves cleaning bathrooms) and the screen if frequently split by masking devices (like in the poster). All of this style is clever, and overall this is a very good looking film, but it is totally overdone. It's impossible to watch the film and not notice every single double, which gets very tedious and really doesn't add up to much in the end.
This feels like a movie that has a slick script that looks great on paper and is nice and sleek looking on screen, but really doesn't mean very much once all is said and done. As an exercise in technique it's a lovely work, but it's emotionally rather hollow and has such a pedestrian twist it could just be a big budget Hollywood studio piece (though such a film probably wouldn't look so good).
My problem with Euro movies that feel like Hollywood garbage is that Euros don't really know how to make Hollywood garbage well. They put too much beauty in them (they're Euros after all). On the surface this seems like a nice movie, but if you dig just below the surface there's not that much there. I guess that's yet another "double'.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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