The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 4-10
Dead Ringers (1988)
Directed by David Cronenberg
A world sickened by an addiction to public scrutiny and transformative degradation is Dead Ringers’s subject. “Endless renovations” to the body in order to live with one’s internal mutation away from humanity and towards aggressive artificial betterment. Cronenberg pits sickly identical twins (both Jeremy Irons at his best) obsessed with internal perfection against a woman who can never possess it. Irons, voice like Keratin-coated Scotch, can’t make their manicured perversion work right after proudly asymmetrical Geneviève Bujold enters their lives. They dive headlong into her addictions attempting to reconnect with one another, to find some measure of balance. And the further they fall apart the more the deep reds of Denise Cronenberg’s surgical costumes crash into cinematographer Peter Suschitzky’s deeper blues, spreading across sterile Toronto like pollution. The gentleness of Cronenberg’s direction subtly offsets the torrential psychological damage done by his twin sexual psychopaths. Family here is like poison, slowly released into the bloodstream. Scout Tafoya (May 8, 1:30pm; May 9, 9:30pm at Metrograph’s “Old and Improved,” in a new 35mm restoration from the Toronto International Film Festival)