Suture (1993) Philosophy of the self and the elephant in the room (Review)

A keen suspension of disbelief is key to enjoy genres founded on wonder, whimsy and exaggeration, not having a healthy penchant to believe the unbelievable locks swathes of the more imaginative hues of cinema behind locked doors. Curious it is then that 1993’s existentialist noir about the reconstruction of the psyche, Suture, co-directed and written by Scott McGehee & David Siegel, should have such concerns at its core. The ability to believe the unbelievable is usually never something that occurs within the world of noir – neo or otherwise.

Dennis Haysbert (Clay) attends the funeral of his absent Father, meeting wealthier Brother, Vincent, (Michael Harris) for the first time. Despite one Brother being black and the other white, many of the funerals attendees’ remark on how similar they look. Vincent offers Clay somewhere to stay for a few nights before the long trip home. Vincent is using this opportunity to get away with the murder of their father by planting a bomb in his car, passing the corpse off as his own as part of his plan to start a new life elsewhere with his murdered Father’s inheritance. Barely surviving the resultant blast, Clay has his face, memory and identity restored in hospital, but instead of waking up as Clay Arlington he now believes himself to be Vincent Towers.

Therein lies the gambit of McGehee and Siegel’s film – do you believe Dennis Haysbert and Michael Harris look alike? There is a passing resemblance in the positioning of certain features, at a push, sadly this is a world away from the separated at birth resemblance of Mark Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen for that garbage comedy, Grimsby. While the maxim does state that “necessity is the mother of invention” it still has its limits. Yet herein lies the point, this ambitiously conceptual film is concerned with the construction and reconstruction of identity, using the black and white of its two leads to question whether one person can move from one extreme to the other. Skin is a visual representation of this theory, as a drama, however, it can be confusing.

Like countless other 1990s films around it, stark black and white are used to denote thematic complexity – a crutch used by some of the decades laziest directors. In the case of Suture, the black and white encourage comparisons to Frankenheimer’s Seconds or Teshigahara’s The Face of Another, both films that focus on the fractured persona. Greg Gardiner, who later went worked as director of photography on many high profile comedies, uses space and light to create an empathetic dreamscape. In a final dramatic scene where one persona clashes with the other, Gardiner articulates that haziness by using a shower curtain as a barrier, a single shot that subtly amplifies the unknown that lies just out of arm’s length.

Openly inviting the legacy of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams is dangerously close to naked ostentation, therefore to lessen the grandness of Suture’s intentions a little effort should be spent in providing a context for these unbelievable circumstances to exist within. Instead, an awkward shadow is cast by the naming sensibility. The female lead (Mel Harris) is named Renee Descartes after one of the founding fathers of Western philosophy, which while understandable as a means to draw strands together it is still on the nose. Trying to make a film of theses and ideas more relatable is undone by simple things like naming convention and a casting decision that will alienate many.

Self-discovery is a huge part of a person’s coming of age and a comparably large theme in cinema. However, McGehee & Siegel penned and co-directed a film more intriguing than engaging. While Haysbert personifies the loss of self and confusion in a career high performance, it’s difficult to get lost in the haze like the script is begging for due to the constant awareness of the elephant in the room. It’s simply impossible to forget that Dennis Haysbert and Michael Harris look-alike by the thinnest slither; a simple double-take would undermine the entire concept. That may be the point but for many, that is a leap of faith too far.

Suture is well directed, acted and shot by a cinematographer whose experimentation makes for a glorious viewing experience. At the same time, it’s an endlessly interesting film pinned around a vigorously interesting intellectual proposition, which alone makes it worthy of rediscovery. This isn’t really what we’ve come to expect from arrow video, noir aspirations, shot composition and design be damned – Suture is a wilfully difficult and intellectual art film. Interesting? For sure, but difficult to negotiate.

Thanks for reading our review of Suture

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