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Despite the case in question there is in all likelihood an audience that would regard such a self indulgent work as far too much unless they seek it out as masochistic therapy for the mind. One might assume then that “The Double” is a form of a miracle. This movie has done all for the self indulgent art film. The film is inspired by a Dostoevsky’s novella, but has been placed in a completely imagined universe where only the dialect alludes to the setting of the world the audience will return to after the film. “The Double” applauds it self-referential construction by relentlessly parodying the opening five minutes of “Brazil”, Orson Welles’ “The Trial” and “Eraserhead” to look and declare itself as right.
The film starts with Jesse Eisenberg seated in a solitary gray-yellow subway car which has a faint light illuminating from its windows. Shortly, a more belligerent, nameless man claims that the seat of that car is rightfully his despite them being the only two car passengers. Surprisingly, Eisenberg’s timid character, Simon James, concedes to his imaginary superior. This is the premise of the film. Indian-Pakistani office worker, Simon, is a victim of workplace harassment and for the most part is a loner at work; content with crushing on a revered co-worker, who turns out to not even recognize him. Eisenberg’s love interest is a big copy machine operator, Hannah, and she plays by Mia Waskikowska. Simon’s favorite greasy spoon is a mess and run by a Uber-Lynchian woman who doesn’t know who wonder. After work Simon stares through a telescope from his uncomfortable looking apartment; one night he witnesses a fellow tenant take their own life.
Not long after this, another figure steps into Simon’s world: a second self, if you will, one James, a surface level, overly self-assured and entertaining person who very quickly earns Simon’s trust. Or rather, Simon starts working for him, in this case combining the great tactics of using Simon’s personality for his own success with Hannah, and later even that of the greaseball waitress. All of this does, to say the least, irk Simon, but being a fearful quaking mess to begin with, he has his own issues that he is not equipped to deal with.
Even though the cinematography and the production design are not particularly original, they do manage to provide “The Double” with a powerful setting. What really differentiates the film, however, is the acting. In his dual roles, Eisenberg is unassumingly spectacular. He takes the recessive aspects of his character in “Squid and the Whale” and brutally tightens them for Simon. He plays the glib, crass James like a “Social Network” Mark Zuckerberg whose only driving factor is ambition but has no ideas. Wasikowska does play only one character. Or does she? Hannah is head spinning schizoid, and Wasikowska appears to possess this fantastic ability to essentially alter the structure of her face at will. So when she wants to change her face to show “blank” affect, boy can she achieve that.
The film, despite its quite sad subjects, has a comfortable forward flow, and Ayoade and Avi Korine (Harmony’s sibling!!), the director, had so much fun writing the screenplay filled with dark, intensely suppressed, and frequently street-talk comedy that only exacerbates the chaos of the plot as it is. Ayoade, who is very famous in humor in Britain, attempts here to set things to right using his obvious intelligence and deep-fried overly filmic style better than when I first encountered him, which was during his directorial feature film debut the teenage intrigue title ‘Submarine,’ which was more forced eclectic than anything else. The divide between ‘self conscious art film’ and ‘forced-eclectic,’ as I’m also beginning to understand, isn’t quite as razor sharp as I thought it was, but still, here Ayoade has managed to find a means by which to make it work, and that is the metric of success here.
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