Suture

The basic story is simple, with two twin brothers, as like as two peas in a pod. Vincent, who wants to change his identity, plans to let Clay die in his place, equipped with his ID. That is the plan - but to realize the plan is not quite that simple. Clay survives against all odds - and from now on everybody believes that he is Vincent. He is accused of having murdered their father, a murder that Vincent has committed. His laborious struggle back to life for him also involves taking on a new, false identity. He can only rediscover his memory through entering someone else's memories, without knowing it himself. For Vincent there is no future unless he remembers - but how is Clay supposed to remember Vincent's past?

The film is in black and white. That is not all: one brother is white, the other one is black. While the whole story revolves around the fact that the brothers are virtually identical, our actual visual impressions as film viewers say differently. Here we are not far from Fassbinder's Querelle, which is also about two almost identical brothers. But where Querelle is about a mutuality, about two men who see themselves in each other, the relationship in Suture is one-sided. One of the brothers is trying to penetrate the other one's image. He tries to become the other in the belief that he is the other. Until the final crucial meeting takes place, the meeting that we see for the first time at the beginning of the film. A black man in a white bath-tub. A white man on a black and white floor. A white shower curtain that separates them. Both with their loaded weapons. Until everything explodes in a cloud of white smoke.

Suture means seam, stitch together. And the film is largely about seams. To begin with about seams in the actual meaning of the word: ''Vincent'' is expertly tacked together by a plastic surgeon after the accident. But it is also about identity as a patchwork quilt, patches stitched together, patches that do not always fit. Identity as a collage, a cover, perhaps? As a patch-work which we use to cover our real selves. Or… maybe we are only what other people say that we are? Suture raises questions, but only gives a few answers.

Suture is also a term within cinematic theory. The extremely cinematically conscious directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel - McGehee took his doctor's degree in Japanese film history - have clearly wanted to play around with this possibility. Here the word gets to describe film as a medium which stitch together a fictitious world which attracts the viewer through his gaze. In that respect, Suture is a film which reveals its seams.
ASTRID SÖDERBERG WIDDING