A MANY-FACETED FILM

Before it was finally seen by festival audiences at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals recently, “Reversal of Fortune” was being touted schizophrenically as a “suspenseful fact-based courtroom drama” and “a delicious, ironic social comedy of manners.” As those audiences discovered, it is both.

Though the film has at its chilly core an aristocratic and seemingly icy-veined Claus von Bulow (played by Jeremy Irons), and is narrated by his permanently comatose wife Sunny (Glenn Close), the movie couldn’t be less moribund. The liveliest and funniest moments come with a third character, Von Bulow’s attorney, Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver), during his sometimes tense, often arch consultations with his exact opposite of a client.

Working with a strong, heavily researched script by Nicholas Kazan, director Barbet Schroeder has boldly chosen four different styles for “Reversal”: docudrama, with flat lighting and source music from radios for the legal defense strategizing sequences; high drama, with overtly cinematic lighting and original music for the subjective, not necessarily truthful “flashbacks” of life between Claus and Sunny; black comedy, with macabre quips flying back and forth between Von Bulow and Dershowitz; and, finally, spiritual fantasy in those moments when narrator Sunny, her cinematic spirit hovering over her vegetating body, introduces herself and other characters.

After seeing the film, audiences at Telluride were hung on whether they believed Von Bulow guilty of murder--as Schroeder had hoped. “Von Bulow is a character who enjoys cultivating the idea of his own guilt,” said the director. “So I did a little bit of the same, in a very perverse way, leaving all options open all the time. I felt like Von Bulow himself, as a director.”