the double hour (la doppia ora) 2009 region free dvd5 italian bcbc

The Double Hour (Italian: La doppia ora) is a 2009 Italian romantic thriller film. It is directed by Giuseppe Capotondi, produced by Francesca Cima and Nicola Giuliano, and stars Filippo Timi and Kseniya Rappoport. Principal photography began in October 2008 in Turin, Italy. The film opened in Italy on October 9, 2009, after premiering in competition at Venice Film Festival in September 2009, where it eventually won the Volpi Cup award for Best Actress for Rappoport. It was also screened at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival. Samuel Goldwyn Films released The Double Hour in the US on April 15, 2011.

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Synopsis

In the wrong place at the wrong time, Sonia takes a bullet to the head during an art robbery. She survives, but later finds herself haunted by visions. Her mysterious past, meanwhile, comes to light under the watchful eye of a suspicious policeman.



Cast

Kseniya Rappoport, Filippo Timi, Antonia Truppo, Gaetano Bruno, Fausto Russo Alesi, Michele Di Mauro, Lorenzo Gioielli, Lidia Vitale, Giampiero Judica, Roberto Accornero, Lucia Poli



Movie Review | 'The Double Hour'

Romance or Film Noir? Both, and a Thriller

By Stephen Holden APRIL 14, 2011

Attention armchair sleuths: After viewing the Italian psychological thriller “The Double Hour,” you may want to see it a second or even a third time to decipher its secrets. The movie, which won its stars, Ksenia Rappoport and Filippo Timi, awards at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, will put mystery bloodhounds on a scent that after about the 20-minute mark is suddenly lost.



At that point, the story slips into a parallel reality that may or not be the dream life of a woman in a coma. The scent can be picked up again in the third act, when “The Double Hour” snaps back to the former reality, or what looks like it, as its heroine, Sonia (Ms. Rappoport), regains consciousness in a hospital after a traumatic shooting.



The title of “The Double Hour,” the feature debut of Giuseppe Capotondi, a successful music-video director, refers to the moment on a digital watch when the numbers of the hour and the minute are identical, say 23:23. If your eyes happen to catch those numbers, you can make a wish, declares Sonia’s boyfriend, Guido (Mr. Timi), a former policeman turned security guard whom she meets at a speed-dating club. A gadget freak who perfected a shotgun microphone, Guido runs an elaborate security system at a lavish gated estate whose owner is rarely there.



How the superstition plays out is only a teasing embellishment to a movie split into parts that only a vigilant detective could piece together. Not to give anything away, but two clues you might miss involve a red bedspread and an enigmatic priest. Yet if, like me, you would rather get lost in a noir than try to second-guess its creators, “The Double Hour” is the best movie of its kind since the French director Guillaume Canet’s hit from 2006, “Tell No One.”



Ms. Rappoport’s strong resemblance to Monica Vitti, who exhibited a similar mixture of anxiety, vulnerability and wariness in Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, adds another layer of uneasiness. Sonia has recently moved from Slovenia to Turin, Italy, where she works as a chambermaid in an upscale hotel. Early in the movie, a young woman in a room she is cleaning commits suicide by jumping out the window.



Mr. Timi’s Guido, a soulful-eyed widower of three years, bears as strong a resemblance to Javier Bardem (with touches of the younger Al Pacino). Guido is an avid consumer of speed-dating sessions, which usually lead to dreary one-night stands.



When he meets Sonia, she seems softer and shyer than the typical hard-boiled speed date, and their storybook romance purrs along, despite an early speed bump. While they are walking on the street one evening, a police car squeals to a stop, and an officer demands identification from Guido, to which he responds with profanity. Just as violence seems inevitable, the men fall into a bear hug; the officer, Dante (Michele Di Mauro), who reappears later, and Guido turn out to be old friends.



The first act ends with a shock. Sonia and Guido, while on a romantic woodland stroll in the back of the estate where he works, are approached by masked robbers who tie them up, drive two large trucks through the gates and ransack the place of its art treasures. When one of the robbers (Gaetano Bruno) threatens to rape Sonia, Guido frantically struggles to stop him, and a gun goes off, the bullet killing Guido and grazing Sonia’s forehead. The movie cuts away from the crime scene so abruptly that you can’t determine exactly what happened.



From here, “The Double Hour,” written by Alessandro Fabbri, Ludovica Rampoldi and Stefano Sardo, never lets up. The genres that the movie touches as it progresses — romance, horror thriller, post-Freudian psychological puzzle and film noir — overlap and melt into one another. The middle section, in which the semi-recovered Sonia returns to work, distracted and anxious after three days of unconsciousness, finds her (and the audience) adrift in a limbo that recalls James Stewart’s obsessive trance in “Vertigo.”



“The Double Hour” might be described as Hitchcockian in the glee with which it puts Sonia in harm’s way, and she seems to be stalked by a ghost she both fears and desires. The movie’s final images are reminiscent of “Body Heat.”



With its extremely tight editing and breakneck pace, “The Double Hour” is strung through with small jolts that may or may not be leads in a circuitous pursuit of the truth. That truth, when revealed, leaves you wishing for an extra 20 minutes of diabolical mind games; you don’t want it to end.