Retrospective: Duplicity (Patreon)

Duplicity is that age old story: a romcom wrapped in a John le Carré novel inside a Steven Moffat script. It is of course written neither by le Carré or Moffat, but it very well could have been. But it's clearly as Tony Gilroy a story as it gets: two reluctant professionals drawn back into the arena to carry out the biggest job of their professional life.

It's tradecraft-heavy even by Gilroy's standards. Within minutes, we're looking at honeytraps, moles, drops, Moscow rules. The whole thing is replete with spy vocab. And yet this is a romcom starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. The plot comes alarmingly close to my own gestating spy romance story (more on that in the future), but stands alone as a lovely little movie about spies trying to love each other in a relationship based on deception.

Then there's the Moffaty bits: the way we experience this relationship out of chronological order. Peter Bogdanovich and others stupidly decried the non-linear structure as pointless and confusing. Bullshit. Melodrama captures how life feels. Non-linear spy romances capture the convolution of love in the espionage world. It can make your head spin after a bit in a similar way to Dial M for Murder, but it's about as fun as that movie too. "Tony Gilroy's second best movie" is a fine thing to be.