Obsession (1976)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1976
	Director: Brian de Palma (Dressed to Kill, Carrie)
	Actors: Cliff Robertson (Spider-man 1-3), Geneviève Bujold (Dead Ringers a.k.a. Faux Semblants), John Lithgow (The Pelican Brief, Interstellar)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Romance, Thriller
	Conditions of visioning: 30.11.2014, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: The wife (Bujold) and daughter of Michael Courtland (Robertson) are kidnapped. The consequences of his decision to pay the ransom or not wil haunt him for the years to come.
Review: I had been waiting to have seen Hitchcock's Vertigo before watching de Palma's hommage to it. I thought it would be closer to a remake and that de Palma would be allowed to show the obsession of the title in a more graphical way than Hitchcock did back in 1958, but I hadn't noticed then that Obsession was one of the first movies of the director, and he hadn't reached his full potential like he did four years later with Dressed to Kill. Actually and as he explains on the informative making-of documentary, he based his script for Obsession on one aspect of Vertigo, not the whole story. I could recognize the influence enough (so that I more or less guessed that the story would turn sour), but it is clearly different enough to be appreciated on its own. The rhythm matches the one of Vertigo: very slow (a bit too much even for me) until the last half hour filled with revelations. I like the 70's look of the movie, but the film looks quite grainy and unresolved, I don't know if this comes from the original copy or from this French Blu-ray edition that could have been better executed. Technically, you can recognize the sure hand of de Palma and his Director of Photography Vilmos Zsigmond. I noticed in particular one "Vertigo effect" (compensated travelling) extremely well executed, travelling backwards while looking down the main character walking up stairs, giving the effect that he was progressing with difficulty or that some forces were pushing him forward and backward at the same time (in the back of the frame we see his associate who plays a major role in the story). A remarkable shot in the History of Cinema. But because of the slow start, the lack of action and the average image quality (there is always a halo around the light, so that I though I had fat on my glasses), I cannot really say I loved the movie althought it contains some great scenes, some of them shot in Florence, a town that I know.
Rating: 6 /10