Duplicity [2009]

When I first started to watch this last night, I knew it all seemed familiar somehow, but couldn't really put my finger on it until some time after the first 15 minutes. Obviously, Duplicity reminded me of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, 4 years later, only without any weaponry and with plenty of dialogues and interrupted time frames for compensation, i.e. keeping the rhythm up. Which was not a bad thing.

The screenplay’s the thing in Duplicity, Tony Gilroy’s bleak but breezy exercise in storytelling sophistication. About corporate espionage and the globe-hopping escapades of high-class sexgod megastars (Clive Owen and Julia Roberts), the film, unlike Gilroy’s previous Michael Clayton, is less concerned with exposing a moralistic portrait of a corrupted culture than with testing how complexly constructed a narrative can be before the center cannot hold and things fall apart. Gilroy cross-cuts between incongruous temporal planes, he leaks essential information gradually, he upends what we think we know with flashbacks, and he persistently realigns the character’s loyalties. The story’s joints creak under that kind of pressure, those gutsy narrative demands, but Gilroy’s serviceable direction manages to keep together the precision-crafted machine—his scriptopuzzle. And the film’s pleasures derive from watching him get away with it, from watching it unfold successfully.

Curious? Keep reading the Cinepinion review here. Or just take a look at the trailer: