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Rating: Was Hitchcock schizophrenic? Did he suffer from that "bipolar mood disorder" which is so trendy to flaunt these days? Otherwise, how do you explain the ease with which Hitch, after directing Vertigo, moved on to producing a film like "North by Northwest"? Two movies as different from each other as night and day: North by Northwest, with its sophistication, its airiness, its free and modern sense of eroticism, suddenly dissipates the dark cloud full of anxiety, death, and sick sensuality of Vertigo. Not before sending to the gallows the Italian distributor who translated it into the pathetic (was he trying to intrigue the coarsest cinema consumers?) "The Woman Who Lived Twice", can we think of Vertigo as Hitchcock's slowest and least manipulated film, a tragedy that has the obsessiveness of nightmares, the inability (typical of dreams) to satisfy our desires, like when we dream of being thirsty and no matter how much water we drink, the thirst continues to torment us. But "Vertigo" shines with a particular light because Kim Novak, a true literary figure for how Hitchcock first shaped and then directed her, makes it her movie, drags the viewer by the tie and holds the thread of an infinite and hidden seduction, wrapping and unveiling it at her pleasure.
James Stewart and his turquoise eyes, which disheartened Paul Newman and led his most fanatic admirers to better counsel, is the conduit between us viewers and the film’s material which in the end is the beauty of Judy/Madeleine. Mystery? Thriller? Nothing could be more wrong, so much so that Hitch, two-thirds into the film, foreshadows with a flashback the identity swap that in the book from which the film is taken is revealed only in the final pages.
The facts are as follows: Scottie is a retired San Francisco cop who suffers from acrophobia. He has a little friend, with big glasses and elementary school teacher outfits, blonde, cute, but nothing to write poetry about. Otherwise, he's a rather solitary and calm type. An old college buddy, who knows his fear of heights and knows he's been dismissed from the police force, wants him to follow his wife Madeleine who seems to be possessed by the sick spirit of a suicidal great-grandmother. Scottie accepts the charge and starts tailing his friend's icy wife: she has strange habits, frequenting a museum where she admires a single painting of great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes, and travels miles to visit a nameless grave in an isolated mission outside the city, and then, once home, it's as if she's never visited that museum, seen that painting, prayed at that grave. Scottie is fascinated by Madeleine, beautiful and mysterious, but he is a rational type and doesn’t believe in supernatural soul transgressions. Yet, day by day, he becomes convinced that there really is something of the deceased in her, a shadowy area where Madeleine cannot look but is led by. A suicide attempt that Scottie saves her from allows him to know her (to the extent that the mystery surrounding her allows) and to fall in love with her. So, Scottie is now no longer curious but completely crazy about her, and his commitment to restoring her serenity, to chase away those strange ghosts haunts him more decisively. In vain. During one of the outings where Scottie accompanies her to places that torment her in hopes of exorcizing the ancestor’s spirit, Madeleine climbs the stairs of a bell tower and Scottie, hindered by his vertigo, watches her fall. The film might even end here as a highly successful melodrama, a perfect tragic ending, a "why did it happen" gloomy and plausible, an anguished soul doomed to suffer unknown years. Yet, it all starts over, with Scottie, after a stint in a clinic to recover from his depressive state, and with his ineffable eyes veiled in incurable melancholy, begins a second life of solitude, wandering like a ghost through the streets of San Francisco and ... meets Judy. Without ambages: Judy was Scottie's college mate's lover, who, taking advantage of Judy's resemblance to his wife, invited her to impersonate a mysterious, sad, genetically doomed to suicide Madeleine for a while (the real Madeleine lived in peace in the country house), just long enough to deceive the naive Scottie, convince him of the bogus madness of Judy/Madeleine and make him a valuable witness in court. Everything goes according to plan until Scottie meets Judy. Bewitched by the resemblance, and somewhat awkward, he tries to get closer to her, pleading her to accommodate the absurd desire of a man who saw the woman he loved die and now sees her live again in the (somewhat vulgar due to her heavy makeup and sadly indifferent expression) appearance of a stranger and secures a dinner with her. Here Hitch includes the flashback that reveals how events unfolded atop the notorious bell tower: there was the real Madeleine stunned and held by her husband ready to push her, and then Judy who cries out impotently because she regrets: she regrets the deception she perpetrated, the death of Madeleine which she tacitly accepted, the impossibility of loving Scottie for the rest of her life, with whom she had truly fallen in love. Judy lets herself be wooed by Scottie, clinging to a small hope that love could be reborn between them without anyone discovering the crime and agrees to the small changes Scottie requests so that she resembles Madeleine more and more. From brunette to blonde, they choose together the clothes Madeleine (i.e., she) used to wear, and she even allows her hair to be styled in a certain way. But, due to a jewel maybe gifted to Judy by Madeleine’s husband as a farewell for a job well done, Scottie understands everything. Then he takes Judy to the same bell tower he failed to climb, forces her to confess, and, deaf to her tears and promises of everlasting love, does not flinch when he sees her fall, frightened by the shadow of a nun who climbed up there because of the noise. Scottie turns around and the camera focused on the bell tower crowned with the blue of a starry night shows a little dot moving away to the bottom right towards the car.
Hitchcock signs his most beautiful film (others may be masterpieces but this is his most beautiful one) and the one with the most bitter message between the lines. That love is a deception. Madeleine never existed. There existed a rustic version but who knows how different. If she has existed -virtually- it was in the mind of Scottie who gave form and substance to the idea of an alluring, beautiful, vulnerable, and fatal Madeleine of whom Judy and her lover sowed the seeds awaiting his bite. Beauty, according to Hitch, does not exist by itself, otherwise, Scottie wouldn’t have had trouble falling in love with Judy once she turned back into Madeleine; it exists because there's always someone who senses, imagines it where others see nothing but a pair of breasts and a memorable pair of legs. Beauty (and consequently love) depends on the dreams, the personal history, and the imagination of whoever seeks it and the beauty (forgive the wordplay) is all there, beyond is only disappointment. So perhaps the way the film closes is a desperate yet serene claim of a desire that is selfish, insatiable, incomprehensible, but also an infinite source of intimate and sweet melancholy.
Tout le reste est littérature
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