David Cronenberg’s Spellbinding Double Vision : ‘Dead Ringers’--A Chilling Tale of Twinship

If “The Fly” weren’t notice enough, “Dead Ringers” (citywide, Friday) announces David Cronenberg’s full maturity as a major director, period. Not a science-fantasy director, or a hyphenate of any other description. To think of a film this assured, this unified and this dizzyingly potent, you have to go back to “Blue Velvet.”

In the way that David Lynch hooked us in that film’s first 2 minutes, Cronenberg stakes out his psychological territory with his titles: engravings of childbirth and gynecology according to the medical practices of the Middle Ages.

These intricate imaginings are wrong in weird ways and right only intuitively, but they are potent as myths and they have the effect of making us feel superior and uneasy at the same time. They bring back powerfully those childhood emotions of fascination and revulsion about birth and the inner labyrinths of the body.

That body, its mysteries and its final independence from our will, has always been Cronenberg’s territory, his terra infirma . With “Dead Ringers,” he is his most spellbinding and his least horrific. With the exception of one nightmare dream of Siamese twinship, the horror is psychological. Cronenberg’s elegiac, compassionate story about doctor-twins is wrapped around the twin auras of mastery and sexuality that surround doctors who deal this intimately with women’s bodies.

His screenplay, co-written with Norman Snider, is loosely based on the novel “Twins” by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. That, in turn, grew out of the lives and bizarre deaths of the Marcus twins, Drs. Cyril and Stewart, young, successful Manhattan gynecologists and finally drug addicts who were found dead together in an apartment in Manhattan in 1975.

Using these stories as a springboard, “Dead Ringers” creates a devoted, symbiotic pair of twins, the reclusive Beverly and the rakehell Elliott Mantle, gynecologists and fertility experts. They run a successful Toronto clinic on a bedrock of ability and serious research (Beverly’s), overlaid with charm and sex appeal (Elliott’s). Blithely, Elliott even passes his unsuspecting women on to his “baby” brother: “If we didn’t share women, you’d still be a virgin.”

Jeremy Irons, who plays the two with throwaway brilliance, creates details of character so clear that without clues of clothes or words, we only need to scan his face to know which twin we have in front of us. Elliot is the cavalier user of women (“The beauty of our business is that we don’t have to go out much to meet beautiful women.”); Bev their mute worshiper, with standards of beauty for the inside of their bodies.

Yet “Dead Ringers’ ” power is that it isn’t only about twins; it’s about any relationship that begins with love and ends in pathology.

The Mantles’ delicate balancing act is cracked by a powerful sexuality in the person of Claire Niveau (the splendid Genevieve Bujold). The sort of actress that tabloids love, she’s now on the miniseries circuit (“I need the humiliation as well as the money”). Craving a baby, she comes to the clinic and walks inadvertently into the brothers’ time-sharing arrangement: first Elliot, then Beverly. Her strength as well as her mild sexual kinkiness fascinate the unworldly Bev who falls desperately in love. For the first time, he needs an identity completely his own and cracks up with the guilt of trying to create one.

The strength of the film is that there is never a good or a bad twin--although there is soon a sick one as Bev takes up Claire’s casual pill-popping habit without her sense of how to regulate it. The concern, the tenderness between the twins is apparent, even when Elliot, whose cultural high is watching “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” begins to leave a lot of the tiresome details of their practice to Beverly. The stronger/weaker; more unbalanced/more controlled roles move back and forth, too, until, like the most famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, everything is shared. (Elliot says of Beverly at one point: “Whatever’s in his bloodstream goes directly into mine.”)

A deranged gynecologist is probably the embodiment of a woman’s worst fears, and from the opening there are plenty of chances to worry. Even as students, when the young doctors’ prize-winning invention, the Mantle Retractor, is honored, it’s an iffy visual: the gadget looks like something you’d stretch shoes on. But as Beverly deteriorates, fantasizing “mutant women” and designing medical instruments to handle their “deviations,” Cronenberg balances the horror--somewhat--with the swift, outraged reactions of the clinic staff. Later, even Elliot is nauseated by the depths of his brother’s madness.

Visually, the film is profligately beautiful, from the cool of the brothers’ apartment to the operatic intensity of their scarlet operating gowns and drapes. There’s also a wicked, macabre wit to it, at its peak in the end, when the director gives us a final frieze of junkie brothers, marching past our eyes in only their suit jackets and shorts. This, seconds before the infinite devotion of its Chang and Eng conclusion.