Exquisite, excruciating existential thriller from director Joseph Losey. (Spoilers follow.)
On the simplest level, Mr. Klein is a story of mistaken identity and a powerful indictment of fascism...but it is much more than that. The abiding mystery here is the relationship between a man of mediocre virtue and his doppelganger, who appears to be everything Mr. Klein is not. Mr. Klein at first fears his double, then becomes fascinated by him, then comes to deeply admire him. At the end of the movie, the comfortable bourgeois Paris of Mr. Klein has become a moral cinder, utterly corrupt, and Klein--who only moments before declared, "This has nothing to do with me!"--chooses to follow his double into the boxcar of death.
On the level of surface story, this is a paranoid thriller with a gloomy ending; on the level of fable, it is a story of self-discovery and transcendence, as the two Mr. Kleins, who never meet, nonetheless merge. The best Losey films gives us more than we bargained for and take us to places we did not expect, and this is one of his best and most complex movies.
On the simplest level, Mr. Klein is a story of mistaken identity and a powerful indictment of fascism...but it is much more than that. The abiding mystery here is the relationship between a man of mediocre virtue and his doppelganger, who appears to be everything Mr. Klein is not. Mr. Klein at first fears his double, then becomes fascinated by him, then comes to deeply admire him. At the end of the movie, the comfortable bourgeois Paris of Mr. Klein has become a moral cinder, utterly corrupt, and Klein--who only moments before declared, "This has nothing to do with me!"--chooses to follow his double into the boxcar of death.
On the level of surface story, this is a paranoid thriller with a gloomy ending; on the level of fable, it is a story of self-discovery and transcendence, as the two Mr. Kleins, who never meet, nonetheless merge. The best Losey films gives us more than we bargained for and take us to places we did not expect, and this is one of his best and most complex movies.