Beyond Oblivion

Hugo del Carril's 1956 Argentine film follows a wealthy businessman who has lost his wife to illness. Fernando cannot pass through his mourning; then he meets Mónica, the double of the dead woman, and begins turning her into Blanca. The screenplay is loosely adapted from Georges Rodenbach's novel Bruges-la-Morte. The same book fed other films, and Del Carril's has since been compared with Hitchcock's Vertigo, with the point made that it precedes it by two years. Del Carril both directs and takes the lead. Laura Hidalgo plays both women. The register is melodrama, but the violence of the obsession sits at the centre and the woman's own will is steadily erased. Who it's for: those who like classic Argentine cinema and melodrama of obsession. Who it's not for: viewers who expect the female character to exist in her own right; the film deliberately builds her as an object of substitution.