This program brings together several film duos, exploring the unique dynamics of face-to-face encounters. These interactions can take the form of a chase, a direct confrontation, a tense meeting behind closed doors, or a spectacular final showdown. Antagonists, doubles, adversaries, or alter egos: these are all troubled relationships that unite and tear apart the protagonists, between fascination and aversion.
A wealthy novelist receives at his home a more modest hairdresser whom he knows to be his wife's lover. A psychological chess match ensues. Each of them tries to humiliate the other, and one twist leads to another.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Joseph L. Mankiewicz was born in 1909 in Pennsylvania to German immigrants. After studying in the United States and working in the film industry in Germany, he joined his brother Herman, a screenwriter in Hollywood, and began writing a few scripts himself before moving into production. In 1942, he signed his first film as a director when he replaced Ernst Lubitsch on the set of Dragonwyck. Mankiewicz continued to shoot throughout the 1940s and 1950s, making some of the most notable films of those decades: A Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve, Julius Caesar, The Barefoot Contessa, Suddenly, Last Summer... He then agreed to resume shooting the oversized Cleopatra, which consumed him for three years and ended in bitterness. He directed a few more films and then ended his career with a unanimously acclaimed final work, Sleuth, in 1972.
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