Hmmm. Now this is an oddity. Double Take is a mixture of a documentary, a history lesson, a biopic and a thriller. If that sounds like an unfocused mess, that's only the half of it. Just what the hell is going on here?
Opening with images of archive Space Race footage, a meeting between Nixon and Khrushchev, Hitchcock presenting his TV series, the release of The Birds, a 1960s advertisement for instant coffee, Hitchcock doubles, the birth of television and a Hitchcock impersonator attempting to nail that unforgettable voice, John Grimonprez raises many seemingly disparate ideas that he hopes to tie in before his 80 minutes are up. They will be realised or not depending on whether you can make sense of it all; those struggling and hoping that this 'documentary' will settle down into a more fluid and comprehensible piece will be disappointed. This reviewer is in the latter camp.
Hitchcock, at a press conference for The Birds, quipped that his new feature had only two words in the title but it once had three: they dropped 'For' at the last minute. It's witticism that garners laughs from the journalists but 'For The Birds' would have been a perfect title for this one. Grimonprez, the only person who knows what is going on here, has to be admired for the pain-staking research it must have taken to track down all the footage in Double Take. How they are assembled and what's the connection is another matter.
Not content with just that confusion, Grimonprez employs Mark Perry to narrate a short story where a 1962 Hitchcock meets his 1980 double and the conversation that follows is dotted throughout the running time. This might be a clue, as the line 'If you met your double, would you kill him?, is a running motif. Is Grimonprez suggesting that Kennedy and Khrushchev are one and the same in the grand scheme of things? Your guess is as good as mine. There's also a pointed stab at television and its slow strangulation of film: "It is the destiny of every medium to be devoured by its offspring." It is the destiny of every documentary to make sense of its subject too.
