by Douglas Messerli
Richard Ayoade and Avi Korine (screenplay, based on
Dostoevsky’s novella, The Double),
Richard Ayoade (director) The Double /
2013, USA 2014
Perhaps it is also inevitable that, given the surrealist-like elements of such a story, that the youngish (37) British director would also allow himself the influences and palettes of figures such as Gogol (also an influence for Dostoevsky), Kafka, and Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. The later allows him a truly memorable excursion into an office world of sickly green lights, permanent cubicles, and noisy machines from a distant past that strangely are asked to function in a slightly futurist environment. All of this is overseen by a boorish hoot of a manipulator-office manager, Mr. Papadopoulos (Wallace Shawn).
Much like a
figure straight out of Kafka, Simon James is represented as such a person of
low-esteem that he gives up his seat in an otherwise empty train to a man who
claims James is sitting in his seat! Arriving at his place of work, he is told
that his identification pass has been cancelled, and, although he has worked
there for several years, he must sign-in as a stranger-guest each day, the
imposing security guard refusing to be able to even identify him. Indeed,
hardly any of his colleagues can
recall James as a real human being, although many of them are quite ready to
take advantage of his abilities to help themselves to get advances.
From Gogol, the
director has stolen an entirely bureaucratic world where, even though employees
are “required” to attend a company party, Simon cannot gain entry since he has
no current identification papers. Strangely, he is perhaps the only employee
who might have something to truly offer the owner, The Colonel (James Fox)—a
paper outlining the inefficiency of the organization.
The only seeming
joy this loser has is the beauty of his neighbor, also an employee in his
company, Hannah (Mia Washikowska), whom each night he watches through a
telescope as she mysteriously paints figures which she cuts up and tosses into
the trash bin. Simon rushes out to the bin to retrieve the pieces, pasting them
into what we later perceive as an album dedicated to her lost art.
One night he sees
a young man, whom he immediately recognizes as a carbon copy of himself, who
waves at him before jumping from a window to his death. Reporting the incident
to the police, Simon suddenly enters a strange relationship with the “ghost” of
his own being, a doppelgänger that in Dostoevsky leads to his mental breakdown
and in Ayoade’s film ends in his near suicide.
At first, the
relationship develops as a kind of intense friendship, perhaps—as his double
suggests—with a repressed element of homosexuality, as we watch Simon readily
invite James to live with him, and we observe him lovingly stroking the
intruder’s face in a rather Narcissus-like gesture.
But that friendship quickly is transformed
into anger and even hate as he watches his doppelgänger hired by his own
company, which quickly praises James’ talents, and offers him a position far
above that which, despite the several years of servitude, Simon has attained.
Like others in the company, James takes advantage of Simon’s intelligence by
forcing him to take the battery of tests the company requires, while admitting
that he does not even know what the company does. Simon’s abilities allow James
to easily pass the test and move even higher in the company structure, or, at
least, in Papadopoulos’ and the Colonel’s appreciation of him.
He quickly
recognizes that to do so would be to destroy himself. Fired from the company
which has almost served has his home, the “simple Simon” of this tale figures
out simply how to survive. Like James, Simon will wave to his doppelgänger as
he leaps to his death.
In the earlier
scene in which he have watched Simon fall, the police have noted that had he
only landed momentarily on an nearby overhang, he might have survived, severely
hurt of course, but able to recover. Simon does just that and is awarded, in
turn, praise from both the detective and the love of Hannah.
What happens to
James seems murky at best: is he now truly destroyed, believing Simon has died?
Has Simon’s survival determined the end of opponent’s activities? Ayoade’s film
does not even attempt to reveal the fictional reality it has created. And that
is, indeed, the problem with much of film. What does the sickly retro landscape
of this film have to do with its subjects? I suppose we can see a society that
steals from an age before it in order to make over reality as being a kind of
doubling. But it seems, at best, a kind of charming tick: as some reviewers
simply commented, Ayoade, like Wes Anderson, has his own private landscape in
which he works.
Although Kafka
does not seem far away from the bureaucratic ridiculousness of Golyadkin Jr./
Golyadkin Sr. tale of Dostoevsky, the various intense encounters Simon has with
authority throughout the film, only reiterates his own nerdish sensibilities,
without particularly offering us new insights into James’ condition. Ayoade
does, through at least two scenes, take his character back into the horrifying
relationship he has had with his mother, but other than her being a kind of gorgon
who can enjoy nothing in life, she seems, living in a perverse nursing home, to
be basically far-removed from his current life, and he seems to have a
perspective about it that allows him to distance himself from her oppressive
demands. And what are we to make, finally, about the whole sequence of life and
death events between the two major figures, with its vaguely vampire-like
implications?
If Ayoade, at
times, seems like a talented director, he is also, at times, an amateurish one,
who is still unable to make all the references that apparently so charm him
cohere. There are many pleasing elements in The
Double, the comic-seriousness of its tone, the slightly estranged landscape
it creates, and the oppositional characters it represents; but at moments this
movie seems to be pulling in too many directions at all once, forcing some of
its elements into highly symbolical significance, while rendering other aspects
into something like comic riffs to which the director never returns. So let The Double be just that, an
apprenticeship-like piece, a work of a director discovering his themes and
techniques. We need such movies, for they are what eventually result in great
film-making. It’s clear, finally, that Ayoade is learning quickly about what he
wants to do and how to do it effectively. If The Double does not represent great filmmaking, it is surely far
and away better than most of movies we must currently endure by the so-called
“professionals.”
Los Angeles,
May 14, 2014
Reprinted from Nth
Position {England] (June
2014).
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