Double Identity uses the old type of slug-film, a discarded 16mm screening copy of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), duly scratched in the middle so that the images are no longer of any use.
Thanks to a mirror effect Jack Nicholson takes on the identity of a dead man in both the “dead” 16mm footage and the resurrected digital copy of himself on DVD. He recounts how a blind man once gained his sight back, only to see how ugly the world was: he looks at Maria Schneider and stares at himself over the scratch in the faded 16mm version of his life. Maria Schneider decides to leave the scene. She stares at her digital mirror image but when she tries to get closer, she is absorbed by the big scratch in the middle and the fading world of film.
