Set in the world of industrial espionage, Duplicity is a light but trying-too-hard romantic entertainment wrapped around a hollow centre in which Clive Owen and Julia Roberts fail to work up the chemistry to ignite the required fireworks.
Writer-director Tony Gilroy has plundered the book of time-shifting tricks he first employed in the corporate thriller Michael Clayton. Where others would settle for a flashback or two, he’ll throw in a dozen for the hell of it and then bend over backwards to make them at least initially confusing. But here the results tends to the smart-arse - as in pointlessly contrived - rather than genuinely smart.
When MI6 agent Ray Koval (Clive Owen) seduces CIA agent Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts) at an Embassy party in Dubai, he thinks he’s the alpha male top dog - until he wakes up to find she’s drugged him and ransacked his room. It’s the first of a series of reversals that give the film its title and major theme. Who exactly is conning who here?
When we next catch up with the duplicitous pair, they’re employed by rival American manufacturing corporations as industrial spies. The twist is that she’s really a double agent who’s quietly working with his company to leak top trade secrets - as Koval is apparently amazed to discover during a first contact when he finds he’s the officer assigned to \"run\" her as an agent for his company.
Soon after we get the first of several lengthy flashbacks when we see the pair running into each other in Rome earlier and running through exactly the same elaborate 'I know you"/ 'No you don’t" dialogue that we saw in the previous sequence. Viewers won’t know what the hell is going - some may not realise they’re not meant to – though all will be explained at the movie’s finale.
From here we see the two supposedly fall in love – which never feels believable for a second – and deciding they so adore the palatial surrounds they choose for one of their trysts that they will quit their intelligence jobs and find a way of raising US $40 million for their blissful future while employed in the corporate sector.
Gilroy weaves a cat’s cradle of temporal dislocations and ambiguous situations, where we never exactly know what’s going on or where anyone’s true motivations lie. This is true both of the leads and the heads of the companies they work for (played by the always rewarding Tom Wilkinson and a miscast Paul Giamatti).
Duplicity’s twists are diverting enough to maintain a minimum degree of interest throughout. There’s no question it continually asks its audience to do some work to keep up, in itself no bad thing. But ultimately this is insufficient as a raison d’etre, and the film’s modishly cynical tone is strangely at odds with its aspirations as a romantic entertainment. Very quickly it becomes hard to care either way who the heck is scamming who.
