Enemy (15.)
Directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Melenie Laurent, Sarah Gadon and Isabelle Rosselini. Opening January 2nd. 95 mins
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 I was positively skipping down the street after leaving the cinema, a big stupid contended grim slapped across my face. Because Enemy, though it takes itself very very seriously, feels like a beautiful artful prank. It's one of those What-The-Hell-Was-That-All-About pictures that either entice you or leave you feeling shortchanged. During the screening at least three people walked out before the end from an audience of less than thirty so it is not for everyone but for me it worked beautifully and it pulls off a gloriously oblique effrontery of an ending.
On the face of it, Enemy seems to offer little to get excited about. Villeneuve is a Canadian art house director who made his name with Incendies and his Hollywood debut Prisoner. 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.
It 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.)
Enemy's plot could be written up on a single page; its mood in a sentence. (Not by me though.) 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. David Lynch will be much quoted here as a reference point, but we should specify that it is a particular aspect of Lynch, best expressed in the first third of Lost Highway. It is those scene that take place inside the protagonist's house but when it seems that whenever people walk off screen they 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. Opening January 2nd. 95 mins
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 I was positively skipping down the street after leaving the cinema, a big stupid contended grim slapped across my face. Because Enemy, though it takes itself very very seriously, feels like a beautiful artful prank. It's one of those What-The-Hell-Was-That-All-About pictures that either entice you or leave you feeling shortchanged. During the screening at least three people walked out before the end from an audience of less than thirty so it is not for everyone but for me it worked beautifully and it pulls off a gloriously oblique effrontery of an ending.
On the face of it, Enemy seems to offer little to get excited about. Villeneuve is a Canadian art house director who made his name with Incendies and his Hollywood debut Prisoner. 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.
It 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.)
Enemy's plot could be written up on a single page; its mood in a sentence. (Not by me though.) 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. David Lynch will be much quoted here as a reference point, but we should specify that it is a particular aspect of Lynch, best expressed in the first third of Lost Highway. It is those scene that take place inside the protagonist's house but when it seems that whenever people walk off screen they 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.
