Enemy (2014)
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
A mild-mannered college professor discovers a look-alike actor and delves into the other man's private affairs.
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Adam and Anthony's status as reflections of one another, for example, seems to cry out for some visual differentiation between their opposing worlds, but both are drenched in the same sickly yellow glare, at times reminiscent of Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime.
A scene at a sex club is reminiscent of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” or Stanley Kubrick’s “Eye Wide Shut,” while the identity-switch subplot recalls Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger.”
The Adam-Anthony pair echo much better films with doubles, including the twins in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers and the fake doubles of Vertigo, a pointed influence.
Wading through its plot in a slow, limping, groggy demeanor, many scenes are simply just characters stalking and following each other — recalling Hitchcock’s Vertigo, among his other films.
Much like David Lynch by way of David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers is an obvious reference point, but I also found the disconnected urban metropolitan menace of Mulholland Drive and Crash a very palpable influence), whether its mysteries make all that sense – intentionally or otherwise – is hardly the point.
The Adam-Anthony pair echo much better films with doubles, including the twins in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers and the fake doubles of Vertigo, a pointed influence.
Does it contain a whiff of Villeneuve's feelings about Canada's greatest art-film auteur prior to his arrival, David Cronenberg , whose " Dead Ringers " is one of cinema's finest tales of doubles.
Enemy’s “twins” aspect invokes David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, but the film’s look revels in beige concrete in a way not seen since his early films Stereo, Crimes Of The Future, and Shivers.
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Cloaked in acrid yellow hues, it might have been dreamed up in committee by David Cronenberg, Luis Buñuel and the Polish master of freaky psychosexual gloom Andrzej Zulawski, whose surpassingly weird Possession (1981) this very much recalls.
In a dazzling opener that recalls the chilly sexual innuendo of Eyes Wide Shut, a bearded man (Gyllenhaal) joins others in an underground gentleman’s club where live sex theater is the attraction.
His newest film Enemy opens with the cryptic quote “Chaos is order yet undeciphered,” from the José Saramago novel which its based on, The Double, and then gives us an erotic yet disquieting dream sequence in which protagonist Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) checks into an Eyes Wide Shut style strip club that has a strange fetish for spiders crawling along the dancers.
Mix in Eyes Wide Shut's plinking/cagey 'sex party'.
Could an "Eyes Wide Shut"-inspired cult have cloned Adam/Anthony or something?
"Enemy," which debuted at TIFF alongside "Prisoners," marks Villeneuve's most personal film to date, occupying the dark corners of the unconscious of a piece with Roman Polanski's doppelganger creeper, "The Tenant" (1976).
This is obviously not the first time we’ve had a film about doppelgangers — see Kieslowski’s wondrous The Double Life of Veronique, Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece Persona, hell, there’s even a new one coming out later this year from Richard Ayoade called The Double, not to be confused with the Saramago novel that Enemy is based on — but Enemy really hones in on the existential dread of what it would be like to meet your double in a way that Ayoade’s comedic sensibilities, the sensitive humanism of Kieslowski, and the enigmatic qualities of Bergman couldn’t.
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Jake Gyllenhaal is inspired as both halves of one fractured whole: history professor Adam, the kind of guy who, in the first act of almost any other movie, would realize he needs to go out into the world and find himself; and Anthony, a philandering actor whose latent maliciousness stirs up Robert Blake-in-Lost Highway levels of uneasiness.
"Enemy" represents a rather bold career move for Villeneuve, known for "Incendies" (2010), a French-language Canadian revenge story, and "Prisoners" (2013), with Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman, a tough crime film that probably brought lots of offers for big-budget studio action-dramas, none of which likely would have included a scene in which the lid of a golden tray is lifted to reveal a large black spider.
The Oscar-nominated " Incendies " concerned the horrors of war in a nameless but vividly evoked Middle Eastern country, while last year's " Prisoners " was a lacerating tale of kidnapping, terror and torture in a no less carefully described Pennsylvania town.
The first act of this movie is a headfirst plunge into an uncomfortable headspace rarely matched—and certainly unexpected, considering Prisoners and Incendies, the more straightforward recent films on Villeneuve’s résumé.
Thick with weighty themes, disquieting portent and anxious tension, Villeneuve—the Foreign Language Academy-Award nominated director of “Incendies”—crafts a gripping slow burn portrait of the male id/ego, our self-destructive tendencies and how they control us.
Much of the suspense takes place inside the characters' minds, and the obscure narrative calls for a more delicate balance between realism and fantasy than Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, Prisoners) can provide.
After Enemy, Incendies and Prisoners I’d rather something cheerful, too.