MYSTICAL DOUBLES: on the films The Wrong Man and Victoria
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In August, Kinosophy is dedicated to the theme of mystical doubles, embodying different sides of the human soul — its shadows — and the photogenic nature of truth, which can be captured only by the lens of a film camera.
These are two unconventional masterpieces: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) and Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015), a film that demythologizes contemporary Berlin while inheriting the spirit of the French Nouvelle Vague, with its manner of lending feature films the quality of a documentary testimony of the era in which they were shot.
Renowned as a true master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock here reveals himself as a devout Catholic, showing the invisible through the everyday, while his protagonist becomes a victim of divine providence. The young German director, triumphant at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival, appears as a fierce advocate of «truth at 24 frames per second». Both films offer not only emotions and meanings but also a captivating anthropological adventure. On a Saturday evening, or indeed, whenever one chooses.
THE WRONG MAN (USA, 1956)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle
E
very great film tells a story not so much about who killed whom or who loved whom, but about truth, lies, miracles, and mysticism: their interplay within the structure of narrative or imagery is cinema’s central philosophical problem. The Wrong Man — one of Alfred Hitchcock’s finest works, unrecognized and misunderstood in the author’s own lifetime — speaks only of this. Of lies that kill, of truth that kills with no less mercilessness, of mysticism to which everything is subject, and of miracles that still find a place even in the most hopeless situations.
Christopher Balestrero (Fonda), a devoted family man and double-bass player at the glamorous Stork Club, becomes the prime suspect in a crime he never committed. But even before we learn this, Alfred Hitchcock himself appears on screen, in person, to warn us: «This film is unlike any other film I have ever made. No suspense. Nothing but the truth».
He was not being coy, nor hypocritical, nor deceptive: The Wrong Man, based on a magazine article, was and remains perhaps the most transparent and at the same time the most enigmatic of the master’s films. Of course, Hitchcock treated the criminal curiosity described by Maxwell Anderson («The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero») on the pages of Life with respect. Yet in the hands of a genius — one who liked to coyly insist he was merely baking «tasty little stories» for his audience — that article became a hopelessly philosophical parable, a system of mirrors, where truth, lies, and miracles swirl into an unseen spiral of depth and darkness.
The police drag the unfortunate musician around to small shops, asking robbed storekeepers: «Is this the man?» Terrified, they confirm: «That’s him». Untangling what’s happening is made even harder by the fact that Henry Fonda’s character himself cannot understand, radiating utter bewilderment. Balestrero languishes in a prison cell, the American justice system briskly constructs a case against him, and the wife of this «appointed» criminal slowly but surely loses her sanity. The realism of everyday Life, as if mocking us, underscores the incomprehensibility of what has happened. Its providential nature.
Disguised as an honest Hollywood film, The Wrong Man seems imbued with a hopelessness unmatched by any Warner Bros. drama of its time. Yet it is not without a light at the end of the tunnel. Even its very title forces us to ask: is everything we see on screen a lie, mistaken by us for reality?
The Wrong Man is not a detective story but a parable of atonement for another’s guilt and of the miracle that befalls a person who has lost all invisible supports of hope. Deeply religious, raised in the Catholic tradition, Hitchcock — who had earlier encrypted his metaphysics — here spoke for the first time with full candor and religious naiveté. The true subject of the film is not the story borrowed from a magazine. It is the drama of mystical doubles, embodying different sides of the same human soul — its shadows.
It is no coincidence that at the very moment when Fonda’s utterly desperate character prays in his cell, the face of the real criminal, heading out on his last job, begins to surface through his own. And poor Balestrero, accidentally ensnared by divine providence, understands nothing.
Ahead of its time, Hitchcock essentially created here a matrix for the «virtual» film — one that, upon release, pleased neither critics, nor audiences, nor even the director himself. A world of deeds, gestures, and words shares the stage with a space of vision — our own. The gaze is the main instrument of communication, the tool of choice, the key to the mystery.
Of crime or of cinema — it makes no difference. To Hitchcock, they are one and the same. A director who traced the genealogy of cinema to voyeurism — to the morbid passion for peeking — believed the screen was not a window onto the world but a keyhole into someone else’s bedroom. And in this case, into the Creator’s very own study.
VICTORIA (Germany, 2015)
Director: Sebastian Schipper
Starring: Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski
There is a saying that «all films on earth were made by Jean-Luc Godard, even if they were not made by him». This remains true today in relation, among others, to the German drama Victoria — the story of one night’s adventures of a young Spanish girl in the «other» Berlin. One night, leaving a nightclub, this would-be pianist from Madrid meets four German drifters and accepts their invitation to roam the hipster neighborhood of Mitte.
What begins as a playful flirtation soon gathers dark, sinister shadows, turning into a descent to the very «bottom» of Berlin — with its hidden vices, fleeting romances, and crime. The plot twists at least thirty times before the terrible truth, or true terror, is revealed. It is useless to try to make sense of it all, because truth may well grin back with a smile that is not human. The story deceives, swerves, and with each turn, the Berlin sky grows darker, more infernal.
Victoria is yet another homage to Godard’s cult debut Breathless (1960). It was then that the legendary French director first proved that films could be made while entirely ignoring the smoothness of editing — just as Life itself ignores it — and virtually wiped out such devices as the classical shot–reverse–shot. More importantly, Godard was the first to give feature films the quality of documentary testimony of the era in which they were shot.
He was the first to teach cinema how to capture urban everyday Life, and the true atmosphere of 1960s Paris turned out to be anything but sweet — it was bitter. Similarly deceptive in its «summer lightness» is the nocturnal Berlin of Sebastian Schipper, who films his story with no editing at all, in a single uninterrupted 140-minute take — for which he was awarded at the Berlin Film Festival.
In Schipper’s cinematic Berlin — astonishingly photogenic, in line with Godard’s legacy — the air is stifling and frightening: not because of the conventions of neo-noir, but because that is the truth. The secret of Victoria’s authenticity lies in two things: Schipper, following his French Nouvelle Vague predecessors, shot the film on real, and therefore hostile, streets of a Berlin that only seems casually safe. Certainly, the technological and economic dimensions are significant.
But the philosophical pathos of Godard’s discovery — repeated by a resourceful German in Victoria — outweighs the practical circumstances that made it possible: «cinema is truth at 24 frames per second». Truth multiplied by intoxicating, chemically pure adrenaline.
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