Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30916 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-05-27
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 94 minutes

Special Features
English
Region 2

Synopsis
In one of director Brian DePalma's many cinematic tributes to Alfred Hitchcock (this one borrows from VERTIGO and employs Hitchcock's frequent collaborator, composer Bernard Herrmann), Cliff Robertson portrays an American businessman whose wife and child are killed in a botched kidnapping rescue effort. Years later, while in Italy, the still-distraught widower begins an affair with a woman (Genevieve Bujold) whose resemblance to his late wife is rather uncanny. The script was co-written by Paul Schrader (TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL).

Customer Reviews

Deja vu
Cliff Robertson's Obsession is for Genevieve Bujold's exact double of his kidnapped and murdered wife of twenty years earlier, but the title could just as easily stand for director Brian De Palma's over-fondness for Hitchcock and Paul Schrader's penchant for remaking The Searchers (complete with "Will he kill her/Will he kiss her?" ending). It's great fun as long as you haven't seen Vertigo - and when this was released in 1976, Hitchcock's masterpiece had been out of distribution for nearly two decades - but the similarities in both style and content become very apparent of you have. At one point they were even more pronounced with an unfilmed `fourth act' that saw Robertson descending further into further madness.

Nonetheless, the director's visual flourishes and audacious love of the purely cinematic in his camera movements, all the more sumptuous in this 2.35:1 widescreen DVD transfer, and Bernard Herrmann's brilliant penultimate score, with its magnificent final waltz theme, carry you along despite the air of familiarity. Anchor Bay's original release includes a featurette on the film and the original trailer.

PALI (-N) MPS( -C) EST
Based on a very smart screenplay directly written for the screen by Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma, OBSESSION is, in my opinion, the masterpiece of the director of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. The movie can be read at several different levels but is primarily an excellent thriller treating of the guiltiness felt by a man who failed to rescue his wife and his daughter when kidnapped in New Orleans.

The key of OBSESSION lies in the scene of the first encounter between Courtland and Sandra, in the medieval church in which the hero married his first wife. Sandra is trying to restore old paintings that happen to have been themselves painted over older paintings. Asked by Courtland if the new paintings will be erased, Sandra answers that it's not useful to destroy them in order to bring into light the original ones.

So OBSESSION is clearly an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO but is also a movie of its own who deserves credit. I remember that the sumptuous travellings of De Palma's camera were, in the seventies, rather unusual in the american production and generated numerous critics. One can only observe, 25 years later, that De Palma new aesthetics has inspired a whole generation of american filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg for instance, who has understood that a camera movement could produce emotions in the viewer's heart.

A DVD zone your library.