With this year’s Cannes circus just a week away, now is as good a time as any to point out the strangely hobbled journey taken by so many festival films to our cinema screens. For all the concentrated media attention and occasional trophies lavished upon arthouse titles at Cannes, Sundance and the like, the festival itself is little more than a starting block in a long race for distribution — and “The Double Hour,” a wickedly splintered Italian thriller currently on limited release in the US, has been running it for a while.
The debut feature of Giuseppe Capotondi, a director hitherto acclaimed for his commercial and music-video work, “The Double Hour” was one of the under-the-radar hits of the 2009 Venice Film Festival — the only title amid a lackluster slate of homegrown features to capture critics’ imaginations, it surprised many by landing the Best Actress award for striking Russian lead Ksenia Rappoport. Despite this success, it’s taken 18 months to reach American arthouses; in the UK, it still hovers in distribution limbo.
The wait should have been shorter, not least because Capotondi’s film is anything but obscure in sensibility: a sharp, sexy hybrid genre piece generously bookmarked with cinematic references, it touches on heist thriller, psychological horror and romantic drama, all with equal panache.