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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
film noir identity, 17 Sep 2002
A movie which helps to challenge our notions of identity in a modern age.Vincent - who is under investigation for the murder of his father - aims to kill his brother Clay and take his identity. Vincent is rich while Clay is poor. Unfortunately Clay survives and is taken into hospital where he is presumed to be Vincent by a psychiatrist, a plastic surgeon and his friends and staff. The only problem is that Vincent is obviously white and Clay is obviously black. Even when Clay wakes up to discover he has amnesia and watches video footage of Vincent he doesn't see himself as black and his brother as white. The only time doubt crops up about Clay's false identity is in a police line-up (to do with the investigation into the murder of Clay/Vincent's father), but this confusion is put down to the extensive plastic surgery Clay has had after the murder attempt. 'American Psycho' plays with the idea that nobody pays any attention to anyone else, people are just interested in themselves. In 'Suture' people see what they want to see. They think Vincent has changed, become a nicer person, but they don't see the obvious. They want to beleive he is Vincent. Even Clay wants to beleive he is Vincent. Filmed in black and white with a stark minimalism and clever use of monotone 'colour' - it uses a trick from the old b&w westerns where the 'good guys' wear white and the 'bad guys' wear black. Vincent starts off wearing white suits, living in a white apartment, this is then adopted by Clay when he becomes Vincent. The next time we see Vincent he is wearing black. The film creates a haunting sense of dislocation and out of place, a modern world which should be familiar but is as alien to us as it is to Clay. Dennis Haysbert puts in an excellent performance as the confused and amnesiac Clay. He reprises a similar role of confusion and wide-eyed naivety in the recent TV thriller series '24' as Senator Palmer. A thoughtful, modern take on the film noir which helps to bend the genre in much the same way as Paul Auster did in his novel 'The New York Trilogy', (it feels almost as though the book has been transferred to the screen).
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