The Double (2014)
Directed by Richard Ayoade
An awkward office drone becomes increasingly unhinged after a charismatic and confident look-alike takes a job at his workplace and seduces the woman he desires.
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It does, however, often recall the bizarre surrealism of David Lynch or Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and even overtly references Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and David Fincher’s “Fight Club.”
The film's most direct touchstone, however, is clearly Terry Gilliam's Brazil , a film which backs its exquisite design and inventive conception with a devastating humanism.
The Double is similarly rooted in pop culture’s past: Though the film adapts a Dostoyevsky novella, it seems equally rooted in the grim, post-industrial dystopias of George Orwell’s 1984 and particularly Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which it resembles in tone, theme, and look—and pretty much every way one film can resemble another, including matching its finely tuned, Monty Python-esque sense of absurdity.
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.
Suggested by a Dostoevsky novella, but set in an entirely created world in which only the language makes any reference to the place moviegoers will reenter once they exit the theater, and paying homage to the likes of " Brazil ," Orson Welles ’ "The Trial," and "Eraserhead" within its first five minutes, "The Double" insists upon its bona fides with a will and makes you like it.
Richard Ayoade is the writer and director of this oddball film which is based on the 1846 Dostoevsky novella The Double and brings to mind Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Orson Wells' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial .
It does, however, often recall the bizarre surrealism of David Lynch or Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and even overtly references Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and David Fincher’s “Fight Club.”
Ayoade’s treatment of the material is boldly stylized, with aesthetic nods to directors as varied as Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet to Alfred Hitchcock – from whose Rear Window the film borrows heavily in constructing Simon’s unrequited romance with Hannah.
In the film, we watch Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg, whose deep-set cheeks and geometric frame recall an Edward Hopper figure) spying on Hannah (Mia Wasikowska, ostensibly lamblike, though her fierce side rears its head) from his apartment window through a phallic telescope à la Rear Window .
Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Simon’s voyeurism is a product of his immobility: not of a physical crippling as in Hitchcock’s picture, but of an emotional-existential hobbling.
There’s a cocktail of loneliness and voyeurism a la Rear Window for Eisenberg’s Simon.
For one thing, Simon's voyeurism is straight from Rear Window.
Suggested by a Dostoevsky novella, but set in an entirely created world in which only the language makes any reference to the place moviegoers will reenter once they exit the theater, and paying homage to the likes of " Brazil ," Orson Welles ’ "The Trial," and "Eraserhead" within its first five minutes, "The Double" insists upon its bona fides with a will and makes you like it.
The harsh yellow lighting seems ripped from The Element of Crime, while the elliptical structure and the paranoid, desolate design of Simon's world evokes both Eraserhead and The Tenant .
And you sense it in the vivid display of hallucinatory grotesqueness that instantly recalls Lynch’s headscratchers, “Eraserhead” and “Mulholland Drive.”
Anyway, it’s not as if Gilliam’s flawed masterpiece is the only thing on Ayoade’s mind; one could just as easily cite the first “Matrix” movie, “The City of Lost Children,” Michael Radford’s 1984 film of “1984,” David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” and a whole list of 1970s science fiction.
Richard Ayoade’s The Double looks like Terry Gilliam by way of Eraserhead.
Ayoade has cited Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation “The Trial” as a key influence, with its similarly labyrinthine sense of entrapment, along with “Alphaville,” “Eraserhead” and the dry Nordic comedies of Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki; the latter’s imprint is particularly apparent in “The Double’s” regular eruptions of deadpan humor and its rich, almost Sirkian color palette.
Suggested by a Dostoevsky novella, but set in an entirely created world in which only the language makes any reference to the place moviegoers will reenter once they exit the theater, and paying homage to the likes of " Brazil ," Orson Welles ’ "The Trial," and "Eraserhead" within its first five minutes, "The Double" insists upon its bona fides with a will and makes you like it.
Richard Ayoade is the writer and director of this oddball film which is based on the 1846 Dostoevsky novella The Double and brings to mind Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Orson Wells' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial .
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 while the film may be based on Dostoyevsky, it’s just as much in debt to Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, an absurdist nightmare of prison cell apartments and inhumane authorities seeking to trap the only seemingly sane man alive.
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Channeling the dark and moody dystopian worlds of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen, The Double is staged in a universe that seems futuristic but also recalls the early days of computer databases.
Like the off-kilter retro-futuristic worlds of “Brazil” and “Delicatessen,” “The Double” feels like a parallel universe that allows more fascinating things happen.
The production design (by David Crank, There Will Be Blood) recalls Brazil or Delicatessen, but less fun.
For all that, the The Double often feels as indebted to Brazil and Delicatessen as it does to those geniuses.
It does, however, often recall the bizarre surrealism of David Lynch or Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and even overtly references Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and David Fincher’s “Fight Club.”
The Dostoevsky novella served as the official source of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1968, barricades-busting Partner, and has also inspired dozens of doppelgänger movies, from Fight Club to the recent Enemy, Denis Villeneuve’s drab drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a pair of strangers no one could tell apart.
With obvious cinematic reference points such as Brazil, Delicatessen, Fight Club and Rear Window, Ayoade repeatedly turns to film history to help further inform the narrative.
The Dostoevsky novella served as the official source of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1968, barricades-busting Partner, and has also inspired dozens of doppelgänger movies, from Fight Club to the recent Enemy, Denis Villeneuve’s drab drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a pair of strangers no one could tell apart.
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.
Richard Ayoade’s second feature as director, The Double (Grade: B-) is a loose reworking of Dostoyevsky in the idiom of Brazil and Soderbergh’s Kafka.
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Set in a futuristic society of noirish government zombies slaving away in bleak bureaucratic bunkers for offices, it’s more a satire of Godard’s Alphaville than a menace designed for the Syfy channel.
Ayoade has cited Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation “The Trial” as a key influence, with its similarly labyrinthine sense of entrapment, along with “Alphaville,” “Eraserhead” and the dry Nordic comedies of Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki; the latter’s imprint is particularly apparent in “The Double’s” regular eruptions of deadpan humor and its rich, almost Sirkian color palette.
There are still clear references—one shot of Simon walking along a ridged, blue-painted wall recalls the “Modern Love” sequence of Mauvais Sang—but here he starts to come into his own as a filmmaker.