USA,
1993, 96 min
Shown in 1994
CREDITS
- dir
-
Scott McGehee, David Siegel
- prod
-
Scott McGehee, David Siegel
- scr
-
Scott McGehee, David Siegel
- cam
-
Greg Gardiner
- editor
-
Lauren Zuckerman
- cast
-
Dennis Haysbert, Mel Harris, Sab Shimono, Dina Merill
- source
-
Samuel Goldwyn Company
-
COMMENTS
Scott McGehee and David Siegel in person.
OTHER
Suture, a striking first feature by two bold and original new San Francisco area filmmakers, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, explores our most basic assumptions about the nature of identity and how we are defined, both from within and without. Clay Arlington and Vincent Towers are estranged half-brothers, and almost identical twins. Vincent re-establishes contact with Clay, seemingly with the intention of getting to know him better, but in actuality using Clay. Miraculously surviving a car accident, Clay is hospitalized with amnesia, an unrecognizable face and a walletful of Vincent’s identification papers. The doctors and plastic surgeons naturally assume this scarred amnesiac is Vincent, and begin to restore his memory and face based on photos, videotapes and disparate other traces of his “lost” identity, trying to reconnect him to a life that was never his. Shot in lustrous widescreen black-and-white, the mood is reminiscent of such classic mid-sixties paranoid thrillers as Edward Dmytryk’s Mirage and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, blended with a healthy dose of deadpan humor. Suture’s complex and multileveled story manages to be both deeply compelling and profoundly alienating as it explores the relationship of our interior and exterior selves. It’s about what we mean when we say we know who we are.
FACTOID #107
Incubus, the only known film made in the Esperanto language (at least the only one starring William Shatner), played the 1966 San Francisco International Film Festival.
