•
Rating:
"I believe that a film like this represents something very important in a career; it is the realization of a dream that every director must cherish at some point in his life, the dream of being able to connect things to achieve a single movement" (François Truffaut)
It's 7:30 in the evening like many others, in a New York that seems to want to stay seated at the back of the theater to enjoy the show when the camera decides to draw back the curtains of an ordinary apartment to spy on what is happening inside. The long take begins. A time. A space and an action. And the action, as often happens in these cases, is a murder: Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Grander) strangle their friend and former schoolmate David (Dick Hogan) with a rope just a few minutes before the guests arrive for a small party that the two have organized in their apartment. They decide to hide the body in an old chest in the living room, on top of which the food for the guests will be served. The guest of honor for the evening, however, will be their old teacher, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), who, suspicious of David's unjustified absence, will try to discover what lies behind the growing nervousness of the two hosts.
Many consider "Rope" (the original title - much more fitting - "The Rope", 1948) little more than an experiment, an exercise in style aimed at satisfying the boundless directorial ego of someone who in every respect can be considered the master not only of thrillers but also of voyeuristic cinema: Alfred Hitchcock. The concept behind this film is to shoot an entire film without cuts, using a single, uninterrupted long take. Let's start by saying that such a project, as it was conceived, could not have been realized anyway, due to the simple fact that at the time, reels that long did not exist. For this reason, Hitchcock decided to overcome the inconvenience by using a series of directorial tricks (not all of which were fully successful) to try to limit the viewer's sense of "cut" in the shot and at least suggest the illusion of a single long take. Thus, the camera, every ten minutes or so, approaches a dark object (most often a jacket), filling the frame, then moving away (after the cut) as if it were a simple camera movement in a long take. To resolve the inevitable scenic problems of camera mobility, small wheels were even installed under practically every piece of furniture in the apartment, as well as a series of fixed microphones, so as to dispense with the boom.
The implications of such a directorial choice, needless to say, are numerous. The camera ends up being an eyelidless eye, the dream of every voyeur, who finally no longer needs to look away from the object of its attention. Real-time is no longer artificially broken down and recomposed during editing but comes to be identified with cinematic time. But most importantly, the role assumed by the audience changes. The only witness to the murder is the viewer (who from the very first shots is shown the face of the killer), but it is an impotent witness, unable to reveal their secret to the other co-protagonists and to put an end to the whole story. This develops a kind of "reverse suspense", of public impersonation with the two murderers. Only they, in fact, know what happened to David. Only the audience can share the growing tension of Brandon and Philip. Only the audience can understand which insinuations, comments, and actions of the guests may undermine their plan. Only the public and the killers can grasp the grotesque side of not only using a coffin as a dining table but also of all the conversations about chickens being wrung, strangulations, and hangings with which the guests amuse themselves. And thus is created that very understatement that Hitchcock loved so much, that ability to juxtapose macabre and dramatic situations or themes with the light and cheerful tones of the characters' conversation or the setting.
Brandon and Philip kill David apparently without any motive. Having to overlook for reasons of space the interpretations of those who have seen (more or less rightly) a suggested homosexual relationship between the two killers (who would have wanted to punish the "traitorous" friend guilty of joining a woman), more attention deserves the much less concealed critical approach to the Nietzschean theory of the superman, or at least to some of its aspects most susceptible to "misunderstanding." In "Rope," it is not only the murderers who end up on the dock, but also and especially what drove them to kill. Brandon, who is certainly the more slippery, cynical, and cerebral of the two (the dominant half of the couple, if you will), is convinced that murder is an "art reserved for the chosen few" who, precisely because of their intellectual and social superiority, would be justified in committing it. Not only the act of the two protagonists, therefore, but also the very choice to enclose the body inside a trunk, translates into a clear reference to concentration camps (let us not forget that the film was shot in the immediate post-war period) and, more generally, to certain extreme pro-Nazi ideologies. Hitchcock merely hints at it, yet it would seem that Brandon has premeditated everything, the murder, the reception, even inviting Prof. Cadell (his mentor and supreme example of a "superior mind") to satisfy his own ego and finally put his own insane convictions into practice, denying the existence of another individual unworthy of living ("people like David only take up space").
And it is a pity that, at least from this point of view, the conclusion of the story, or rather the dialectical synthesis that emerges from it (with Professor Cadell retracting and modifying his convictions, defending their validity only from a theoretical standpoint), ends up being, in my opinion, perhaps not entirely convincing, because it is excessively good-natured and moralistic.
At 9:15 on that same evening like many others, New York stops enjoying the show and prepares to pour into that ordinary apartment. Maybe because awakened by those three gunshots, maybe because, once the baseness of the human soul has been revealed, there is nothing left to watch. End of the long take.
Loading comments slowly
