With "The Double," English writer/director and
sometimes-comedian Richard Ayoade establishes himself as more than just
the Wes Anderson acolyte we first met with his quirky 2010 directorial
debut feature "Submarine."
Set somewhere outside of
time, "The Double," which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and
just screened at Mexico's Riviera Maya Film Festival, stars Jesse
Eisenberg as Simon James, a joyless, virtually invisible data clerk
whose life is but an endless chain of hours, shuttling back and forth
between a dead-end desk job, where he's mostly ignored, and his spartan
apartment in a cluttered industrial tenement. His coworkers regard him
as "a bit of a nonperson," but something like life sparks within him
when he spies Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), on his morning commute -- and
again at night, from the handy vantage point of his window via
telescope.
A Kafkaesque rigamarole of petty bureaucracy
and life's little obstacles set the tone for this eerie dark comedy:
Simon can't get into his own building because the security guard doesn't
recognize him, he's thrown out of an office party because rumor has it
he doesn't even work there, and his own shrewish mother is off her
rocker in a depressing nursing home. Gliding over all is a shadowy
figure known as The Colonel, whose Orwellian PSAs remind the world,
"There's no such thing as special people. Just people."
But things get even weirder when the new guy in the office
is a man called James Simon, the mirror inverse of Simon's name and
also his spitting likeness. Simon's doppelganger even wears the same
drab, oversized suit, but what's worse is that James is far more
charming and charismatic. He starts taking credit for Simon's work --
and whatever it is that he does, no one seems to know -- kissing the ass
of his moody toad of a boss (Wallace Shawn) and even, oh the horror,
making advances on Hannah, a lonesome waif desperate for a human touch.
From anyone but Simon, that is, who she regards as "creepy" and a
"snake."
The endless loop of coincidences and
misunderstandings mount, as Simon and James try to one-up each other
through one stunning set piece after the next. The visual tone of "The
Double" is a little art deco, a little steampunk, a lot of noir, but
also its own strange animal. I thought of Orson Welles' Kafka adaptation
"The Trial," in which Anthony Perkins runs in place as the world around
relentlessly persecutes him without explanation. And like that film,
"The Double" also grounds its noirish premise of stolen identity in a
spooky industrial landscape of malevolent smokestacks, creaking pipes,
leaky faucets and rows of archaic machinery that produce endless reels
of photocopies.
This isn't the first time an emerging
punk auteur has adapted Fyodor Dostoevsky's little-read novella "The
Double." In 1968, just before his breakout "The Conformist," Bernardo
Bertolucci tackled this surreal tale about a lowly office worker's
psychotic break in "Partner," starring the pretty French actor Pierre
Clementi -- who actually looks quite like Eisenberg, whose terrific
performance balances the easily frustrated neurosis of Simon with the
smooth debonair of the smarmy James.
"The Double" also shares DNA with Denis Villeneuve's "Enemy."
Coincidentally, that film also premiered at TIFF and with two
doppelgänger thrillers at the fest, they may have cancelled each other
out buzz-wise. While both deal in doubles and woman-troubles, Ayoade's
singular vision more prominently brings to mind Gilliam's "Brazil," with
its themes of dilapidated identity, and the bleakly gorgeous, almost
handmade quality to the artful production design.
A
tour de force of editing, lensed in vivid chiaroscuro by Erik Wilson --
and not to mention featuring a killer chamber score by Andrew Hewitt --
"The Double" is a cinematic swoon, certainly one of the most
imaginative and riveting head trips to come along in some time.
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