The Double (15.)
Directed by Richard Ayoade.
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor, Yasmin Paige, Cathy Moriarty and James Fox. 93 mins
The evil twin/ doppelganger plot is invariably a drag whether it is in episodes of Star Trek or Friends, or Muppet’s Most Wanted, or Dostoevsky. This time it is Jesse Eisenberg who is playing against himself, firstly as Simon the put upon nobody who toils wretchedly in his bureaucratic job and then as James, his charismatic, self-confident look-alike, who starts work in the office and proceeds to take over his life.
Let’s start by making it clear that The Double is a tour de force piece of film making and shows that Ayoade’s magnificent debut Submarine wasn’t a fluke. It looks to have been made for next to nothing on a small number of sets and locations but they have been expertly employed to conjure up an unclassifiable parallel universe where key elements of the latter half of the twentieth century in America, Britain and Soviet Eastern Europe have been encapsulated into a frozen moment of time. The film sounds as good as it looks with some immaculate sound design and a remarkable score by Andrew Hewitt. It’s a bona fide hallucinatory black comic nightmare.
My issue with Richard Ayoade’s version of The Double is that it is largely other people’s version of The Double. Submarine had its Wes Anderson twinges but it was predominantly his own unique vision. The Double is a magpie vision. The first and most obvious reference point is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil but with all the vim and vigour kicked out of it and given a coating of Inside Llewyn Davis melancholy. But then you pick out bits of David Lynch, early Von Trier, Polanski so by the time you think you’ve caught him trying to slip a bit of The Exorcist past you, it has all become a bit much.
This Dostoevsky adaptation offers a direct route to Kafka, the -esque of which is often a sure route to avoiding the humour in a comic situation. There are laughs in the film but mostly Simon is just too unrelentingly pathetic, and his persecutions just too excessive, to evince much sympathy. Here’s this comic sap trapped in a world of abstractions and there’s no spark of life in him, which is worrying in a film that seems to have a romanticised view of suicide. In Submarine depression was compared to being trapped under water and this whole film is submerged in such maritime gloom.
Directed by Richard Ayoade.
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor, Yasmin Paige, Cathy Moriarty and James Fox. 93 mins
The evil twin/ doppelganger plot is invariably a drag whether it is in episodes of Star Trek or Friends, or Muppet’s Most Wanted, or Dostoevsky. This time it is Jesse Eisenberg who is playing against himself, firstly as Simon the put upon nobody who toils wretchedly in his bureaucratic job and then as James, his charismatic, self-confident look-alike, who starts work in the office and proceeds to take over his life.
Let’s start by making it clear that The Double is a tour de force piece of film making and shows that Ayoade’s magnificent debut Submarine wasn’t a fluke. It looks to have been made for next to nothing on a small number of sets and locations but they have been expertly employed to conjure up an unclassifiable parallel universe where key elements of the latter half of the twentieth century in America, Britain and Soviet Eastern Europe have been encapsulated into a frozen moment of time. The film sounds as good as it looks with some immaculate sound design and a remarkable score by Andrew Hewitt. It’s a bona fide hallucinatory black comic nightmare.
My issue with Richard Ayoade’s version of The Double is that it is largely other people’s version of The Double. Submarine had its Wes Anderson twinges but it was predominantly his own unique vision. The Double is a magpie vision. The first and most obvious reference point is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil but with all the vim and vigour kicked out of it and given a coating of Inside Llewyn Davis melancholy. But then you pick out bits of David Lynch, early Von Trier, Polanski so by the time you think you’ve caught him trying to slip a bit of The Exorcist past you, it has all become a bit much.
This Dostoevsky adaptation offers a direct route to Kafka, the -esque of which is often a sure route to avoiding the humour in a comic situation. There are laughs in the film but mostly Simon is just too unrelentingly pathetic, and his persecutions just too excessive, to evince much sympathy. Here’s this comic sap trapped in a world of abstractions and there’s no spark of life in him, which is worrying in a film that seems to have a romanticised view of suicide. In Submarine depression was compared to being trapped under water and this whole film is submerged in such maritime gloom.
