The
second feature of Mexican writer-director Salomon Askenazi, Two Times You, a labyrinthine nonlinear
existential psychodrama of sorts, is another one of those films which feels
right at home with such strange bedfellows as David Lynch, Nicolas Winding Refn
and Quentin Tarantino. While easy to
draw comparisons to those three filmmakers when assessing this Spanish language
thriller, one hardly cares while watching that Two Times You proudly wears recognizable influences upon its
sleeves.
Surreal,
dreamy and often deliberately incoherent, this recently acquired import, like
David Robert Mitchell’s own Under the
Silver Lake will either entrance viewers with its beguiling mysteries or
annoy with impenetrability. Whatever the
case, the first thing you’ll want to do when it’s over is seek out and purchase
the soundtrack album which would make the likes of Johnny Jewel or Cliff
Martinez blush.
Opening
on two cousins, Daniela (Melissa Barrera) and Tania (Anahi Davila),
double-dating with their husbands at a social event involving plenty of booze,
the relatives hatch an idea to swap wedding rings before going home with each
other’s respective husbands. When a
drunken drag race home goes awry, leaving one of the swapped couples dead, the
film takes on an increasingly jagged rhythm between past, present, premonitory
fears of the future before gradually building towards an existential anomaly
which leaves the audience with more homework in their laps than they prepared
for. Not content to confront the
mysteries of displaced couples falling in and out of love, Two Times You also serves up what-if scenarios throughout until
neither we nor the characters are sure what plane of reality we are on anymore.
Either
the work of a brilliant auteur or a student filmmaker eager to impress his
contemporaries, whatever you make of Two
Times You won’t take away from the technical quality of the filmmaking, the
strength of the performances or the original score’s ability to lull you into a
trance. Much like Combat Shock, one of the leading actors Daniel Adissi contributed
original tracks to the film which will immediately remind viewers and listeners
of Kavinsky’s Nightcall opening
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, replete
with aerial helicopter shots of nighttime cityscapes. Whether the film succeeds artistically or
not, the soundtrack to this thing soars and will likely get more attention than
the film itself.
While
not a masterpiece and debatable whether or not it emerges as a successful
narrative, Two Times You is truly an
interesting exercise in nouvelle vague inspired nonlinear filmmaking. Reportedly this film went through an
extensive editing period with nearly twenty different cuts of the film before
settling on the one released in theaters, and though the finished product is
bound to leave more viewers scratching their heads than making sense of it,
what’s here will find a way to worm it’s way into your psyche. I may not have liked the picture all that
much, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since first seeing it.
--Andrew Kotwicki
