Until recently, Richard Ayoade was known primarily as a cult TV comedy actor and that nerd from The IT Crowd. With his directorial debut, Submarine (2010), Ayoade has started to create a name for himself as a promising filmmaker. The aforementioned production was a downbeat, quirky British feature about a mildly eccentric Welsh boy's growing pains. It was packed with dry wit, dark humour and bleak outlook. Ayoade has retained some of those elements, and exaggerated others, in his latest release. The Double is an adaptation of the Dostoevsky novel of the same name, about a low-grade governmental employee who loses his mind when a doppelganger starts stealing his life.
That basically describes the plot of the film, too. Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) plays Simon James, a depressed minor civil servant who suffers from crippling self-doubt. He is in love with aloof co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) but too nervous to do anything about it. Between his crushingly miserable job, empty ramshackle flat and passive aggressive mother there is nothing in Simon's life. That is before his lookalike James Simon shows up, finding employment in his office and generally dazzling everyone with his gregarious charm. For James Simon is the reverse of Simon James, the other side of the same-DNA coin, and is a man who gets what he wants. The extrovert knows that 'the world steps aside for a man who knows where he's going', and proceeds to punish hapless Simon. He steals Hannah, Simon's flat and eventually pushes him out of the company.
Visually, The Double is predictably being compared to Brazil and Eraserhead. Ayoade has created an Orwellian dystopia of a setting, somewhere unnamed where the Soviet apartment blocks have a North Korean attitude to electrical supply. Simon's company is just a grey building of grey cubicles and grey employees, run by their Big Brother boss, 'The Colonel'. The whole thing looks great, in a depressing kind of way, and Ayoade has filmed it spectacularly. Stylish use of light, camera work and soundtrack instills the feeling that we are ourselves immersed in an inescapable '80s dictatorship. But what is the point of doing this? The film really could have been set anywhere, because it is not about exterior themes but interior ones. Politics and architecture has nothing to do with the personal issues at the heart of the story. As funny as the catch-22 bureaucracy and health-and-safety-gone-mad incidents are, they do distract from the themes at the heart of the story. What it does do, nonetheless, is make the audience feel like depressed Simon.
Is the film about two characters or just the one? Is James another part of Simon or is he really a separate person? For me, The Double does tell the story of two people, but in a wider sense is an examination of the complexities of human personality. The use of a Kafka-esque plot is a neat way to muse, Jungian-ly, on these matters. Simon's inability, then need, to assert himself is as important as the jokes and aesthetics. I suspect that Ayoade has created a work far deeper than a contemporary review will be able to analyse comprehensively.
The plot is not particularly original. Maybe it was in nineteenth century Russia, but in cinema the identity theft scenario has been played already. Richard E. Grant even saw himself usurped by his own boil (How to Get Ahead in Advertising). Still, there is a wickedly dark humour. Comic cameos pop up constantly, with the likes of Tim Key, Chris Morris and Chris O'Dowd. Most of Submarine's cast is present, taking with them some of the flavour of their last collaboration. Eisenberg is well-suited to both roles, for he plays James and Simon.This film will be cinematic Marmite - but love it or hate it, there's no doubt that Ayoade has shown that he is not a one trick pony in terms of filmmaking. One to watch...
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