Duplicity(2009)
Two romantically-engaged corporate spies team up to manipulate a corporate race to corner the market on a medical innovation that will reap huge profits and enable them to lead an extravagant lifestyle together.
Two romantically-engaged corporate spies team up to manipulate a corporate race to corner the market on a medical innovation that will reap huge profits and enable them to lead an extravagant lifestyle together.
The photographer and family man Matyas is married and has a happy life with his beloved wife Claire, who is pregnant and near the delivery, and his young son Pierre. Matyas was raised in an orphanage, and he believes his mother died when he was six. However, he receives a correspondence and discovers that his mother has just passed away and that he has a twin brother, Thomas. Matyas does not recall his childhood with his mother and brother and has problems with blood. When Thomas visits his family, Matyas becomes paranoid, believing that his sibling wishes to takeover his family.
This, the second film of the continuing autobiographical Duplicity series, is composed of superimpositions much as the mind "dupes" remembered experience into some semblance of, say, composed surety rather than imbalanced accuracy - as thought may even warp "scene" into symmetry, or "face" into multitudinous mask. What will have been becomes what will be being. I've tried to "give the lie" to this genesis of all white-lying.
The final Duplicity film does seem at resolve with the term. All previous visual manifestations have been extended to their limits, through four-roll superimpositions. Obvious costumes and masks. Drama as an ultimate bid for truth, and totemic recognition of human and animal life-on-earth dominate all the evasions a duplicity otherwise affords.
On one night, in the same apartment, two dates take place. One is between Rose and her boyfriend. The other is supposed to be between Rose's sister Lily and a new romantic interest of hers. But Lily decides to stir up trouble - it's just supposed to be a bit of fun, but Rose soon finds herself on the precipice of betrayal.
A friend of many years' acquaintance showed me the duplicity of myself. And, midst guilt and anxiety, I came to see that duplicity often shows itself forth in semblance of sincerity. Then a dream informed me that SINCERITY IV, which I had just completed, was such a semblance. The dream ended with the word "Duplicity" scratched white across the closed eyelids (as the title "The Weir-Falcon Saga" had been given to me). I saw that the film in question demonstrated a duplicity of relationship between the Brakhages and animals (Totemism) and environs (especially trees), visiting friends (Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Donald Sutherland, Angelo DiBenedetto and Jerome Hill among them) and people-at-large. I saw that the film shifted its compositions equally along a line of dark shapes as well as light, and that it did not progress (as did earlier Sincerities) but was rather a correlative of SINCERITY I. Accordingly I changed the title to "Duplicity.".