As a European, I didn't know anything about the story of "Dickie & Babe" before watching this movie. All the praise - or at least a good part of it - goes to the original narrative techniques employed by director Tom Kalin: it truly feels like watching a movie/documentary of the 20s. The fact that we know this is a movie made in the early 90s only makes of some of these techniques out-and-out Brechtian distancing effects: among others, the reports made by the analysts, which aim at showing the homophobic mindset of science (as a reflection of that of society) of those times and the sequence about the physiognomical analyses of skull/face features which sought to find the explanation for determinate (immoral) behaviors in a person's physical appearance. But examples of the same sort abound in the movie, and we can even think of it as a clever composition of Verfremdungseffekte all facing today's viewer with the same question: Who is the actual perverse (and "deranged")? Leopold and Loeb or rather "the society in which they live(d) in"?
Review of Swoon
