Duplicity is the name of the gioco at
the heart of this suspense thriller.
After a bizarre opening sequence involving
a suicide that a hotel chambermaid witnesses at work, the story seems pretty
straightforward. Until it is not.
Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport), the chambermaid,
is a Slovenian-Italian who works at an upscale business hotel. She has been
living in Turin only a month when she meets Guido (Filippo Timi), a local
ex-cop, at a speed dating event.
Guido, an attractive widower in his
thirties, serially speed-dates to ward off boredom and loneliness. Speed dating
here is a bit like bingo for adult daters; the ‘prize’ is the prospect of an
evening and uncomplicated sex with a like-minded stranger.
Guido’s mildly amused and diffident
self confidence in concert with his good looks contrast with his strutting cock
‘competitors’ in a way that one imagines makes him attractive to women.
Sonia, trying to meet local men,
falls under his spell, seeks him out, and draws this cautious widower out of
his shell.
They go home separately the first
evening they meet when Sonia notices the time on Guido’s digital watch: 23:23.
She tells him that she needs to sleep to be ready for an early morning shift at
the hotel.
Guido tells her that the time,
23:23 is un gioco—a game, a play, a trick, a trope.
Un gioco? Sonia asks.
La venti-tre, venti-tre: la doppia ora, Guido says, giving us the film title. He
explains that when one sees ‘double time’—the same number of hours and minutes
on a digital watch or clock—it is the same as seeing a falling star. ‘You have
to make a wish.’
‘Does it work?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says—a throwaway flirt
line.
But there is un gioco afoot.
Sonia calls the speed dating organizer Marisa (Lucia Poli) as soon as she can
to request that Marisa give Guido her number.
Despite the ‘blurbs’, this film does not bear
easy comparison with the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Rather than raid a potboiler
for telling shots as Hitchcock did time and again to stunning effect, Capotondi
has colored a range of moods with details of a complex narrative.
If anything, the
‘references’—fleeting shadows, muted colors, dark figures behind opaque glass,
a frightened woman home alone in a bathtub—are closer to the horror than the
thriller genre.
To disclose more details would ruin
il gioco. That said, Guido’s former police colleague Commissario Dante (Michele
di Mauro), Sonia’s hotel coworker Margherita (Antonia Truppo), and Signor Bruno
(Fausto Russo Alesi), a regular hotel guest, provide notably full-bodied and
entertaining supporting roles among a competent cast.
 |
| Commissario Dante (Michele di Mauro) |
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| Sonia’s hotel coworker Margherita (Antonia Truppo) |
The effect of the narrative that
follows the film’s critical event is similar to that of The Usual Suspects
(1995), but rather than an inventive master criminal playing a timorous dupe
weaving fact and fiction into a plausible alibi, the dreamweaver here is one character’s
guilt running rampant though an active, unconscious mind.
The difference is three days.
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