Enemy (15.)
Directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Melenie Laurent, Sarah Gadon and Isabelle Rosselini. 95 mins
Let's start near the end, it's a pretty good place to start. After taking more than a year to get a release date in British cinemas, Enemy has been put out for home release just over a month later. Second time round Villenueve's doppleganger tale is even more perplexing, even harder to get a fix on. You know what is going to happen, you've had the movie's meaning explained to you by the man on Youtube, but it has just made it even more inscrutable and difficult to read. Which is great.
Enemy is not a film designed to put a smile on your face. The opening seconds strike a note of oppressive unease which is held for the entire film. And yet an hour and a half later, if the movie is to your tastes, a big stupid contended grim will be slapped across your face. It is like a David Lynch film overseen by David Cronenberg – Lynch is pushing with the wild ideas and Cronenberg is just there holding him back, saying less is more and just occassionally letting him slip in a real brainrush of a scene, including of course its gloriously oblique effrontery of an ending.
Enemy is a strange case of art imitating other art. We have seen two films exploring the doppelganger themes in less than 12 months: before this there was Richard Ayode's The Double in which an ordinary man finds himself being quickly overshadowed and made to look insignificant by someone that looks just like him. And, though Ayode clearly has talent, Villeneuve's sleek cool offering makes his film look like a colourful distraction, a trivial series of homages and borrowings. (Rather than Dostoevsky, this film is taken from a novel by Nobel prize winner Saramago, so Villeneuve gets another mark for doing right by an author whose work had been given the dullest possible screen treatment in Fernando Meirelles's Blindness.)
Because Enemy takes itself very very seriously, it is so much fun. It feels like a beautiful artful prank. It's one of those What-The-Hell-Was-That-All-About pictures that either entice you in or leave you feeling shortchanged.
On the face of it, Enemy seemed to offer little to get excited about. Villeneuve is a Canadian art house director who made his name with Incendies and his Hollywood debut Prisoners. (Enemy was actually shot before Prisoners.) Both films showed considerable skill; he has a great aptitude for shooting a scene in a way that gets the most possible out of it, but also for being overly gloomy. Plus a man finding his double is a story that has surely been done to death.
Gyllenhaal is a university professor who discovers a doppelganger living in another part of town, a bit part movie actor. Intrigued he tries to approach him but it doesn't go well. Slotted into the basic story are various surreal interludes mostly, arachnophobes be warned, involving spiders.
Enemy's whole plot could be written up on a single page; its mood in a sentence. The atmosphere doesn't vary but it is so thick you can almost see it on screen, a light cloud of heavy dread that seems to float in front of the characters in every scene. I've already mentioned David Lynch but it is a very particular aspect of Lynch, best expressed in the first third of Lost Highway. It is those scenes that take place inside the protagonist's house, when it seems that whenever people walk off screen they might disappear forever. Outside that, the film is creepy in the Canadian movie house style – large civic spaces with no people in them, strange impersonal interiors. Toronto has never been more effectively used as a film locations: Villeneuve out Cronenbergs Cronenberg.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Melenie Laurent, Sarah Gadon and Isabelle Rosselini. 95 mins
Let's start near the end, it's a pretty good place to start. After taking more than a year to get a release date in British cinemas, Enemy has been put out for home release just over a month later. Second time round Villenueve's doppleganger tale is even more perplexing, even harder to get a fix on. You know what is going to happen, you've had the movie's meaning explained to you by the man on Youtube, but it has just made it even more inscrutable and difficult to read. Which is great.
Enemy is not a film designed to put a smile on your face. The opening seconds strike a note of oppressive unease which is held for the entire film. And yet an hour and a half later, if the movie is to your tastes, a big stupid contended grim will be slapped across your face. It is like a David Lynch film overseen by David Cronenberg – Lynch is pushing with the wild ideas and Cronenberg is just there holding him back, saying less is more and just occassionally letting him slip in a real brainrush of a scene, including of course its gloriously oblique effrontery of an ending.
Enemy is a strange case of art imitating other art. We have seen two films exploring the doppelganger themes in less than 12 months: before this there was Richard Ayode's The Double in which an ordinary man finds himself being quickly overshadowed and made to look insignificant by someone that looks just like him. And, though Ayode clearly has talent, Villeneuve's sleek cool offering makes his film look like a colourful distraction, a trivial series of homages and borrowings. (Rather than Dostoevsky, this film is taken from a novel by Nobel prize winner Saramago, so Villeneuve gets another mark for doing right by an author whose work had been given the dullest possible screen treatment in Fernando Meirelles's Blindness.)
Because Enemy takes itself very very seriously, it is so much fun. It feels like a beautiful artful prank. It's one of those What-The-Hell-Was-That-All-About pictures that either entice you in or leave you feeling shortchanged.
On the face of it, Enemy seemed to offer little to get excited about. Villeneuve is a Canadian art house director who made his name with Incendies and his Hollywood debut Prisoners. (Enemy was actually shot before Prisoners.) Both films showed considerable skill; he has a great aptitude for shooting a scene in a way that gets the most possible out of it, but also for being overly gloomy. Plus a man finding his double is a story that has surely been done to death.
Gyllenhaal is a university professor who discovers a doppelganger living in another part of town, a bit part movie actor. Intrigued he tries to approach him but it doesn't go well. Slotted into the basic story are various surreal interludes mostly, arachnophobes be warned, involving spiders.
Enemy's whole plot could be written up on a single page; its mood in a sentence. The atmosphere doesn't vary but it is so thick you can almost see it on screen, a light cloud of heavy dread that seems to float in front of the characters in every scene. I've already mentioned David Lynch but it is a very particular aspect of Lynch, best expressed in the first third of Lost Highway. It is those scenes that take place inside the protagonist's house, when it seems that whenever people walk off screen they might disappear forever. Outside that, the film is creepy in the Canadian movie house style – large civic spaces with no people in them, strange impersonal interiors. Toronto has never been more effectively used as a film locations: Villeneuve out Cronenbergs Cronenberg.
