Here’s useful viewing for anyone wondering what the attitude of the Polish public towards the USSR might be almost forty five years on from the forming of Solidarity.
Doppelganger. The Double is a new thriller from film-maker Jan Holoubek that’s set between the late-seventies and mid-eighties, and is currently showing at the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival in London this month. Throughout the film the Soviet state is like an invisible supervillain, sending forth henchmen to do its obscure bidding, and proving itself capable of any degree of intricate and torturous manipulation from afar. Those who live within its borders and those it sends out as its agents of influence all seem prematurely aged, weathered and weary – aware of their constant oppression and straining against it.
Promising young espionage operative Jozef (Jakub Gierszal – looking at times distractingly similar to Arsenal midfielder Martin Odegaard), is currently impersonating an orphan who has been reunited with his French-German family. Meanwhile the real Hans Steiner (Tomasz Schuchardt), is back in Poland trying to discover why his passport application to meet his birth mother keeps getting rejected, which may be due to some kind of lingering resentment, but at times there’s an ambiguity at work here too.
For all the new freedoms Jozef finds in the West, much of what we see of his life in Strasbourg retains a certain bourgeois stuffiness and drudgery. His day job as an admin clerk for Immigration Control involves sitting at a tiny desk in a halogen-bright office populated by many other people sitting at tiny desks. While it’s hardly a hotbed of exciting and fresh experience, it’s more of a reminder that we nearly always end up clock-watching, trying to eke out little relieving breaths in the middle of closely observed routines.
The story beats might be familiar, but Holoubek uses the experience he’s gained from his earlier features (including the acclaimed 25 Years of Innocence), and various streaming television series to confidently and boldly move the film along. He lets events unfold with a tragic inevitability, eschewing what at one point threatens to turn into the (post-)modern equivalent of the “it was all dream” trope – something that seems to have rooted itself in roughly half of the world’s thriller/horror productions.
At times, the film does get caught up in the same myopia of youth as its protagonist, especially when it concerns itself with the compromising relationships that Jozef enters during the period focusing on the Polish side of the story. This occurs during the years when Poland was a crucible of new oppositions to the state, with breaks in ideology informing much of the post-Soviet future, and adding greater weight to the narrative machinations, along with a deeper sense of time and place.
This is a generally solid, engaging movie that’s well-acted, has a score that makes good use of some ECM-esque piano, and has an enlivening, stylish panache of its own.
Doppleganger. The Double is playing at the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2024 takes place in venues across London 6 – 28 March
