I'm saying you can tell that it is two people.
We can tell, based on certain clues that the
script or plot gives us; such as
- the fact that Borden buys a new house while Sarah remarks that just a few days ago he found it too expensive;
- the fact that Borden doesn't remember that he had promised to take Jess to the zoo;
- the fact that right after depressive Sarah says: "You love me today; that makes it so much harder when you don't.", Borden (Al) goes to Fallon (Freddie) and says "I think Sarah is
beginning to suspect something." (Apparently Borden (Freddie) had never told his brother (Al) that Sarah could already sense a difference between the two brothers,
years earlier when Borden (Freddie) explained the Bullet Catch trick to Sarah.)
But we
can't tell from any elements in the character's personalities or the actor's performances that they are two people.
I'm not saying you can tell which twin it definitely is.
If there were clues in Borden's personalities then we could reconstruct which brother it is in almost every scene, because in some scenes the plot tells us which brother it is (those scenes could serve as "reference scenes"), and so we would only have to follow the similarities in personality. However, since there is no clear (and consistent) distinction between the personalities of the brothers (or at least I couldn't detect any in the actor's performances), it's not possible to tell (from personality/performance) in each scene if it's a different brother or the same brother compared to another scene; in other words, theoretically every scene could be "the same brother" (= one person instead of two different people).
In that regard, The Prestige is very different from a movie such as, say,
Multiplicity (1996),
Me, Myself & Irene (2000) or
The Devil's Double (2011), in which the personality difference between two or more characters played by the same actor is very blatant and obvious in the actor's performance.
______
Joe Satriani - "Always With Me, Always With You"
http://youtu.be/VI57QHL6ge0
reply
share