“Enemy” (2013)
“Chaos is order yet undecided”.
Named best Canadian film of the year at the 2014 Toronto Film Critics Association Awards and loosely based on Jose Saramago’s 2002 novel “The Double”, Enemy was Denis Villeneuve’s seventh directorial effort on the big screen in 2013 as well as now completing my own personal catalogue of his films from the past decade. Longer term readers will be aware of my mistaking Prisoners in 2013 for a completely different film, Sicario a year later was a modern gem, Arrival still delights and befuddles me in equal measure, his reverence for the world of Blade Runner shone through in his 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049 and I liked and found Dune interesting, if a little clunky.
So Enemy was the sixth and final piece of my Denis Villeneuve cinematic jigsaw from the past decade and I loved it.
Brief premise? A psychological horror/drama of a double or doppelganger who whilst looking absolutely identical live extremely opposite lives. One is a History professor who lives in squalor and surrounded by a yellowy green hue, the other a Z-list actor living in comparable luxury and within a deliberately brighter, sharper directorial palette from Denis Villeneuve.
Following on from his collaboration with the director in Prisoners it’s to the doppelganger we turn for yet another masterful performance from Jake Gyllenhaal.
“Adam” and “Anthony” (Jake Gyllenhaal). Unkempt and bored of an unfulfilling and repetitive life as a History Professor repeatedly espousing or enthusing over political and societal dictatorships and the distractions employed to misdirect a populace toward the “Bread and Circuses” of sport and entertainment, or a much more ebullient and satisfied with life supporting actor, Gyllenhaal is superb yet again. Biased as I may be, but I’ve yet to see a performance from the 42 year old Californian that isn’t stellar, immersive, thoughtful and particularly here, nuanced, as despite their identical looks both Adam and Anthony are poles apart as individuals. In line with the film it could be argued that one is depressed and at his lowest existential ebb whilst the other is in control of a fulfilled life, but there are many such juxtapositions and one in particular that spoilers will not allow.
There are undertones too that spoilers won’t allow, but there is a need for excitement away from the boredom, sterility, repetition and a somewhat solving of one’s own puzzle akin to Christopher Nolan’s magnificent Memento and whilst not overly stark, there’s a doppelganger argument to be made that has the lightest shade of David Fincher’s incredible Fight Club. Wide, slow cityscapes are shown often with the towers and high-rise buildings full of apartments constantly reinforced through a dirty, yellowy green hue, as are deliberately black and blank slides cutting between scenes. I found these jolted me back to a conscious state of piecing the film together as well as revisiting my earliest ideas of a stalker, a single life shown twice perhaps or the hunted becoming the hunter. Of the undertones omitted for spoiler reasons one would certainly sway toward and coalesce with the film’s general themes of unfulfillment and the repetition of life needing extra curricular excitement to banish the treadmill of ordinary existence, as well as a feeling of societal strangulation and order.
Kudos to Nicolas Bolduc for the cinematography of the cityscapes full of skyscrapers as well as the lighting that brings alive the difference between the two apartments and indeed the lives within them, and for the mournful strings and musical arrangements supplied by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. From a total of just eleven credited roles two are well worthy of inclusion here with both Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) and Sarah Gadon (Cosmopolis) respectively filling the wife and girlfriend roles of “Mary” and “Helen” brilliantly.
Quiet, reflective, existential and with long stretches without dialogue or even the hint of it, this wasn’t the Denis Villeneuve film I was expecting, but that’s nothing new for me!
Highly recommended.
Thanks for reading. Just for larks as always, and always a human reaction rather than spoilers galore. The cave of wonders that is my “Film” archive contains well over 150 blog articles and as an example of the delights in store for you there I’ve linked my most recently published article below together with my ramblings on Denis Villenueve’s Prisoners from 2013 and Dune from last year:
