Instead, I kept forgetting I wasn't watching a Kafka adaptation. I'm well aware no-one seems able to (or maybe just don't like to) agree on what Kafkaesque means, although The Double makes the grade. Simon James, introduced with some clumsy, Buster Keaton-type comedy to show what a cowardly underdog he is, spends his time alone is his room, staring out of a telescope Rear Window-style into the apartments opposite him, usually at Hannah, a girl he thinks too out-of-his-league to do anything more than mumble a few sentences to everyday. It's always night time, and apart from the few locations Simon goes to, the rest of the world need not exist. It's a work orientated world, and he has an office job (it's adapted from a modernist book - what else?) so mundane we never even find out what it is exactly he does. It's not only Kafkaesque in the constantly rattling away machinery of the setting, but in the mind of a character who sees the whole world as violently trying to dismiss his personal melodramas.
The 'inciting incident' that gives Simon's life a jolt is the introduction of James Simon, a man who looks exactly like Simon (not that even Simon's co-workers notice) only... different. He's suave and cool, and to paraphrase Fight Club: he's free in all the ways Simon isn't. And at first it seems like a win-win: he beats up the tough-guy at the bar picking on Simon, he shows Simon how to pull the ladies - our little man starts to loosen up. Then it all starts to go wrong: James starts dating - and cheating on - Hannah, taking credit for Simon's work, even using Simon's apartment. Simon feels trapped again, only now even the life he used to have has been taken over by a smoother-talking version of himself.
You don't have to have met your Doppelgänger to relate to what's happening to Simon. I imagine if everyone was a bit more philosophical - and read a lot more self-help books - then New Year's resolutions would be a litter of people vowing to stop comparing themselves to others. It's an epidemic. The thing everyone falls back on is their differences to the people doing better than them - they had rich parents, they went to university, they weren't born with eight toes - yet Simon can't use any of those excuses because there's a man who looks exactly like him, who seems to only have what he has, doing a lot better than him. A face walking around like a living symbol that he should have done a lot more with his life. And real people feel this pain all the time: there's enough blog posts from single people entering middle age trying to make it clear how not bothered they are that all their friends are getting married and having kids while they're still jerking it twice a day to movie scenes they first watched when they were a teenager.
There's a lot to praise. Ayoade gets the pitch just right: you can't really comment on a director - beyond the formalities of if they're good at staging a scene and etc - from just one movie, and Submarine pointed to Ayoade going for a British, more heartfelt version of Wes Anderson style conventional quirkiness. The Double makes the case for the man as much more ambitious: both in adapting a classic and in creating a whole setting and atmosphere to try and create what the original author was getting at. Jesse Eisenberg - among a cast who are all great - playing both Simon and James, should be praised: most would probably play the difference between the doubles as something subtle, like the difference in personality that could have happened because of one slight change in childhood, like getting rejected by a girl when he was young instead of having her kiss him, which would spiral into him being a confident ladies man in later life - yet Eisenberg comes on strong with the performance. The contrast between the doubles is huge. At first this seems overdone yet by the end of the movie it makes perfect sense, and drives home the point of how common it is to look at other people and imagine how easy it would be to become just like them, before having to the face the reality of it.
The ending is a disappointment, mainly just because for a film that raises questions that I'm betting most viewers will have asked themselves, the film only answers the problems of Simon James. Which is a pretty self-centered criticism to make - which I guess also works as a compliment to the film on how easy it is to relate to Simon's struggle. The ending's so abrupt I hardly remember anything about it; but The Double is one of those films that works up so much good will - one of those films you want to like (and for the most part I did) - that a lousy ending is forgiven.
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