3:05 p.m., 2001-11-02
There is an art to the building up of suspense...and so it begins.
I had a vague recollection of a movie I saw when I was very young. Wispy pieces of a gauzy memory were floating through my mind on the way home last night, but I couldn't pin anything down in my consciousness. The more I ried to remember about the movie, the more unclear it became...reaching a point at which I couldn't explain it to my mom, even though I knew she had seen it at the same time.
The movie was a mystery and a love story at the same time, and occurred in both the present and the past. A woman in the present is having a problem and goes, after much protest, to a hypnotist to try and figure out what is wrong. Under hypnosis, she tells a tale of an ill-fated couple set about 50 years before. The man and woman were in rich and in love. They had an older woman and her son to help them care for their large house. The woman was killed, stabbed with a pair of scissors, and everyone assumed that her husband was to blame. Something bad happened to him, he was either put in prison, or killed, I couldn't recall. The woman in the present, to the best of my recollection, was the reincarnation of the slain wife and had an inexplicable obsession with scissors. She went to the hypnotist multiple times and began slowly to reveal the details of the events that occurred. All that I remember outside of all of this, is that the hypnotist is revealed to be the young son of the couple's maid and the true murderer.
I thought a lot about the story last night, but that is all I could piece together. I could't even remember any actors, or the title, or the year that I saw it. It was a very unnerving feeling, especially because my memory normally serves me very well. I had the idea to go online and search fo the movie. Typing in the words *movie,* *scissors,* and *hypnotist* I was soon greeted with 168 options from which to choose. The very first one gave me my answer. Dead Again, a Kenneth Branagh driven ode to the old Hitchcock films of the 40's, was made in 1991 and also starred Emma Thompson. The amazing thing is, they are both actors I enjoy very much. You could even say that Kenneth Branagh is one of my favorites. Why then, would such a detail slip my mind? Quite possibly because I was only six years old in 1991...
Branagh plays Mike Church, an LA detective hired to figure out the identity of an amnesic woman (Thompson) who wakes up screaming every night. Aided by an antiques dealer and part-time hypnotist who uses his skill to coerce subjects into revealing the locations of vintage furniture, Church and "Grace," as the detective names the woman, discover that they are somehow involved in a murder that took place over 40 years ago.
The murder in question, that of pianist Margaret Strauss, made large-point headlines in 1948. Strauss' husband, Roman, a famous conductor, was convicted of the murder and executed. Branagh and Thompson play dual roles as the Strausses, a couple who vow to love each other forever, but whose relationship is strained by severe money problems and allegations of an affair. Thompson is luminous as Margaret, and Branagh's Roman is mysterious and seductive, cryptic in his acceptance of guilt for a murder he may or may not have committed.
Margaret was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, and scissor imagery dominates the movie. Scissors trim Roman's hair prior to execution, Mike has scissors lying around his house, Branagh's camera shoots random pairs of scissors wherever it finds them - the only thing missing from Dead Again is Edward Scissorhands. The scissor imagery reaches wonderful, ridiculous excess when Mike and Grace discover that she is really an artist, Amanda Sharp, whose work revolves around scissors.
I felt strangely unsatisfied. It was too easy to find the information. In a matter of seconds, all of the anticipation was gone...the tension that had built disappeared, and the ideas became instantly concrete in my mind. I think I liked the feeling of not knowing...
