Body Double
When: Saturday, July 22nd | 23.30
Where: Petralona Park (inside the basketball court), Athens | Back-to-back screening with “Something Wild” | Free entrance
Τhe film will be screened with a newly restored digital print.
Entry permitted to audiences over 17 years of age.
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Melanie Griffith, Deborah Shelton
Runtime: 114'
Year of Production: 1984
Language: English
Subtitles: Greek
Sex, violence, crime and cinema in a feast of Hitchcockian references and voyeurism that dares to unite "Rear Window" and "Vertigo" with soft porn in the same postmodern commentary on the powerful mechanism of illusion that is cinema. Tired of the accusations that critics made against him at every opportunity, De Palma used this film as an outright attack on them, provoking their wrath and fighting to the end the Censorship Committee which considered "Body Double" to be of unthinkable audacity and was about to rate it the commercially disastrous "X" label.
Beyond the overtly Hitchcockian allusions, however, the constantly recurring element of fetishism, as well as its creator's borderline obsessive tendency to chase the twist in the script, "Body Double" deserves to be remembered as more than merely one of the best erotic thrillers of the decade. Above all, whether intentionally or not, the film is an ingenious juxtaposition on the agony of male impotence. The young actor played by Craig Wasson is nothing more than a man who, in the struggle to approach the girl from the apartment across the street while protecting her from the deadly threat of a third person, always comes off second best, undermined on the one hand by the phallic weapons of his rival and on the other by his own insurmountable fears. In this aspect, it is worth returning to “Body Double” for an unexpectedly rewarding and kinky experience. Loukas Katsikas