‘SUTURE’ SWITCH : Hey, John Randolph Once Turned Into Rock Hudson

Scenario: An evil half-brother angles to switch identities with--then murder--his semblance in order to escape suspicion for their father’s murder.

The twist? Although the characters in the story perform as if the two family members are interchangeable, one supposedly “identical” brother is white, the other black.

Welcome to “Suture,” a lush black-and-white, cinematic labyrinth created by first-time filmmakers Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who wrote, directed and produced the film. It opened recently in Los Angeles and New York after winning the best cinematography award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (it will gradually open wider by the end of April).

As the title implies, there’s a certain fascination with things surgical in the film as the physical and psychological identity of the black man, Clay Arlington (played by Dennis Haysbert, who starred in “Love Field”), is “reconstructed” as if he were his privileged, white half-brother, Vincent Towers (Michael Harris), after Vincent’s diabolical plan to dispatch him fails.

In this disturbingly simple achromic world, neither Clay’s psychiatrist nor his seductive reconstructive surgeon (played by “thirtysomething’s” Mel Harris), nor any of the other players seem to notice that a ruse informs their story line: that Clay’s new, post-surgical Vincent is in fact still the African American Dennis Haysbert, not the WASPish Michael Harris.

Shot in Phoenix, the low-budget feature may seem like a wildly humorous yarn, a cruel and bewildering deceit, or an insolent slice of neophyte filmmaking. And for different factions of the audience, it will be all of the above.

A filmmaking team since 1989 when they collaborated on short films in San Francisco, “Suture” creators Siegel, 34, a Rhode Island School of Design alum, and McGehee, 31, a Japanese film aficionado since leaving Columbia University, insist that they have not made a “film about race.”

“We were interested in trying to write a movie about identity, about the relationship between the interior and exterior, and the importance we give to exterior versus interior, and how we come to know who we are,” Siegel says.

For McGehee, the appeal is that “the audience is actually privy to something that the people within the movie are not. Clay’s physical exterior, for the audience, ends up being a kind of marker for something that isn’t there within the story.”

But the filmmakers won’t be pinned down on exactly what is depicted--a sole black man in a movie made by white filmmakers? A black man playing a white man, which renders any distinction moot?

“(Dennis) is the only (African American) in the film. We were very careful about that, it was very planned,” McGehee says.

For his part, Haysbert, who transforms in name only from Clay to Vincent, isn’t troubled by this aspect of the film. “They didn’t want to confuse matters by putting any more black characters in it. I had no quarrel with that at all.” For Haysbert, “Suture” addresses “levels of perception.”

Mel Harris says she knows that some viewers may not “get it.” “If you’re willing to suspend belief about certain things you may visually see, and go with what people are doing, it’s a different experience than if you sit there with your arms folded and don’t take anything in.”

McGehee freely admits that “Suture’s” cinematic tone owes a lot to Japanese auteurs , specifically Hiroshi Teshigahara, whose 1966 surrealistic film “The Face of Another” centers on an executive whose scarred visage, and very existence, is remade by a plastic surgeon. The medical accouterments like cellular skin-tissue maps mounted on the wall in “Suture’s” doctor’s office, are, he says, directly lifted from “The Face of Another.”

“We wanted the whole world that Clay/Vincent occupied to be a gleaming white world,” Siegel says, “a world where his physical difference would be manifest, both to highlight the formal conceit and to highlight what we felt were the social metaphors of the film.”

Though rife with issues--from the class struggle between privileged and marginalized whites to interracial relations when Harris’ rather archly named Dr. Renee Descartes strikes up an affair with her patient--it remains to be seen whether the two filmmakers can control the mixed messages.

Steven Soderbergh (“sex, lies, and videotape”), who helped raise completion money for the project, considers it “a very bold movie.” He believes that in its budgetary category (the $1-million range), the movie outstrips any of its competition. “You see so few films that operate on that many levels,” he says.

Regardless of what the debut filmmakers had in mind, “Suture” is destined for a subtextual life of its own. “It tends to break that kind of seamless seduction that goes on between the viewer and the characters within the story,” McGehee points out.

“Clay is his own Vincent,” Haysbert says. “I kind of wanted to use this (line) as the advertising for the film: ‘You can love this film, or you can hate it, but you can’t dismiss it.’ It is very polarizing.”