Lovebirds (1988)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The inseparable |
| Original title | Dead Ringers |
| Country of production | Canada , USA |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1988 |
| length | 115 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 18 revised from 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | David Cronenberg |
| script | David Cronenberg Norman Snider Based on: Bari Wood Jack Geasland |
| production |
Marc Boyman David Cronenberg |
| music | Howard Shore |
| camera | Peter Suschitzky |
| cut | Ronald Sanders |
| occupation | |
| |
The Lovebirds (Original Title: Dead Ringers ) is a Canadian-American feature film from 1988 . It was directed by David Cronenberg , who was also involved in the script.
The main role in the tragic psychological horror film was played by Jeremy Irons , who plays twin brothers in the film. Irons hardly needed make-up or props to make the two fundamentally different people believable and to give them life.
action
Using the example of two successful gynecologists, the film varies the popular myth that twins are spiritually connected in a special way, perhaps "inseparable".
Identical twins Beverly and Elliot, celebrated gynecologists, researchers and stars of their craft, still live as adult men over 40 unmarried in a strange relationship in a shared apartment in Toronto . The self-confident narcissistic Elliot takes advantage of his brother and basks in fame, while the shy, sensitive Beverly pursues his research unnoticed in the background.
If Elliot then regularly leaves the conquest of the last night to his brother for the coronation (without the women noticing, because they are twins), this is only fair and, from Elliot's point of view, another embodiment of the "twin myth". Because of his shyness, his brother couldn't win a woman on his own anyway, which is what the inhibited Beverly suffers from.
After inconsequential affairs, the fragile, symbiotic balance is overturned when Beverly falls unhappily in love with Claire Level, one of his patients - also a movie star, a diva. At first she meets him after she has discovered the secret of the brothers, with rejection, but at least Beverly now has someone other than his brother, whom he can use as a projection figure for his longing for success. Claire leaves Beverly for a period of filming, who develops a drug addiction problem. He mistakenly imputes an affair to her and falls into despair.
Elliot reacts surprisingly harshly to the loss of his brother's undivided attention. In the course of the film it becomes clear that he is by no means as self-confident as was shown at the beginning of the film; rather, his egomania is based above all on the unconditional admiration of his brother. He sees himself forced to Beverly's troubled, marked by drug addiction and depression behavior copy so that his Zwillingsphantasma is fulfilled - what happens to the one twin, suffer and the others. A half-hearted cold withdrawal for Beverly, coupled with stimulants for Elliot, fails.
This inevitably leads to the economic and social ruin of the doctor's office, while the two sink deeper into their delusions. They feel like Siamese twins who need to be separated. In a drug intoxication, Beverly operates on Elliot to death in "medical treatment". In the final scene he gets dressed, leaves the apartment to call Claire from a phone booth. When it picks up, he hangs up and returns to his dead brother. You can now see both lifeless bodies lying on top of each other.
Reviews
“A film that is more interested in the psychological depths of history than in superficial horror effects, which ends with a terrible annihilation of innate addiction. Based on an authentic case that occurred in New York in 1975; played brilliantly in the double role of the unequal twin brothers. "
“The place of horror is Toronto [...] At best, you are at home here as you would be in an operating theater. Except that in this operating room dissecting incisions are made on the psyche. A film of an infectious cold. "
"'The Lovebirds' is a disturbing essay on body horror , gender panic and middle-class family relationships."
" Staged in the style of a morbid chamber play"
“The fact that the core of the body, which one carelessly takes to be the seat of identity and therefore also identification in the cinema, destroys our trust in physical cinema. [...] The end is a picture of grace [...] a glimpse of a beauty that is out of this world. "
"The nightmare of every woman [...] gynecologists who go crazy (every woman's nightmare [...] the gynos become psychos) "
“It's the Canadian's most radical film, even more polished and thought out than his previous work. The intellectual provocation with its bitter realizations seems to have been followed with subtle caution, in order to no longer just contrast the misconception of spiritual infinity with images of mutated bodies, but to question the absolute basic principle of being. "
various
The background music comes from Howard Shore , a longtime companion of Cronenberg. The somewhat macabre opening credits show fictional gynecological (torture) instruments that Beverly Mantle later designed in the film while he was on drugs, drawn or woodcut over a blood-red background. In the remarkable production and costume design in the operating room, the doctors wear red instead of white, which creates a surprising contrast to the real world - the most famous images in the film.
The case of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker is mentioned several times.
The main features of the film are based on an authentic case that occurred in New York in 1975. The immediate template was the 1977 book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland.
Awards (selection)
In 1988 David Cronenberg won an LAFCA Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for Best Director and Geneviève Bujold for Best Supporting Actress .
In 1988 Jeremy Irons won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor .
The film was hugely successful at the 1989 Genie Awards . With 14 nominations, he won twelve prizes, including in the categories of Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor ( Jeremy Irons ). Geneviève Bujold was nominated for best leading actress .
At Fantasporto , a prize for fantasy films, Jeremy Irons received an award for best actor in 1989. Was nominated Dead Ringers also as Best Picture .
further reading
- Bari Wood, Jack Geasland: Twins: a novel . Putnam, New York 1977, ISBN 0-399-11866-7 (English).
- Mark Browning: David Cronenberg: Author Or Filmmaker . Intellect Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-84150-173-4 , pp. 81 ff . (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
- Helen W. Robbins: 'More human than I am alone' - Womb envy in David Cronenberg's The Fly and Dead Ringers . In: Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark (Eds.): Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema . Routledge, 1993, ISBN 0-415-07759-1 , pp. 134 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
Web links
- Dead Ringers in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Dead Ringers at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Dead Ringers at Metacritic (English)
- The lovebirds in the online film database
- The lovebirds in the German dubbing index
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for The Lovebirds . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , April 2009 (PDF; test number: 61 162-b DVD).
- ↑ Release certificate for The Lovebirds . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry, April 2005 (PDF; test number: 61 162-d V).
- ↑ Janet Maslin : Ringers': The eerier, the better. In: The New York Times . October 2, 1988, accessed on May 20, 2008 (English): "clear and separate personalities"
- ↑ a b c The Inseparable in the Lexicon of International Films
- ↑ Hellmuth Karasek : No man's land psyche . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1989, pp. 210-211 ( online ).
- ^ Emanuel Levy: Dead Ringer (1988). In: emanuellevy.com . Retrieved May 20, 2008 (English, italics through Wikipedia): "'Dead Ringers' is an unsettling essay in body horror, sexual panic, and the bourgeois family relationships."
- ↑ Jens Golombek in: Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf, Willy Loderhose (Hrsg.): Das große Film-Lexikon. All top films from A-Z . Second edition, revised and expanded new edition. Verlagsgruppe Milchstraße, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-89324-126-4 , p. 2899 f .
- ↑ Michael Althen: No body is perfect . In: Die Zeit , No. 7/1989
- ↑ Rita Kempley : 'Dead Ringers'. In: The Washington Post . September 23, 1988, accessed May 20, 2008 .
- ^ Rajko Burchardt: 'Dead Ringers'. In: filmzentrale.com . August 6, 2007, accessed August 22, 2010 .
- ↑ a b c Janet Maslin: Dead Ringers (1988) - Review / Film; A Mirror Image of Disintegration. In: The New York Times . September 23, 1988, accessed May 20, 2008 .
- ↑ See e.g. B. Dead Ringers - David Cronenberg. In: Criterion Collection. Criterion Collection, accessed May 20, 2008 (English, No. 21).
- ^ Mary Breasted: Death of Twin Doctors Linked to Despondency . In: The New York Times . July 21, 1975, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed January 3, 2019]).