Denis Villeneuve has garnered rapturous acclaim for some of
his recent visual extravaganzas – but his earlier, quieter character studies
provide a more-than-ample insight into his genuinely estimable filmmaking
style.
With a panache for plunging into the psychological torments
of ‘wounded’ protagonists, Villeneuve’s Canadian production Enemy centres on the life of thoroughly
bourgeois history professor Adam Bell (portrayed with skill by the versatile
Jake Gyllenhaal), who finds himself trudging through the interminable sludge of
sticky existential ennui.
His slightly cold, statuesque girlfriend (Melanie Laurent)
also fails to elevate his pulse rate.
Adam is a character who almost willingly breathes in the
vapours of mundanity; someone who finds himself increasingly boxed in by the
four walls of routine that imprison him – and it’s evidently taking a crushing
toll.
By day, our jaded agent of action fronts a class of
indifferent students and sermonises on the nature of dictatorship and control
– how totalitarianism is inescapable, cyclical…
As is the case with many moments scattered
throughout the film, these early, seemingly inconsequential scenes and the themes that are unpeeled, prove thematically important to ensuing events.
As Adam navigates through the beige haze of the everyday, an
impending sense of doom begins to permeate the Ontarian skies – even before the
narrative turning point occurs.
One fine (gloomy) day, Adam is abruptly jarred free from this
suffocating quotidian blur, after discovering, to his bewilderment, that he has
an exact physical double residing in the same city – someone he feels impelled
to track down and make contact with for reasons he cannot reasonably
rationalise.
Right from the beginning, Villeneuve’s visual objectives are
clear.
The Toronto setting is drenched in sepia – rendering the
sprawling, awe-inspiring metropolis an otherworldly dystopia – as if the city
in question is actually the cloudy vestige of a long-ago dream.
Imbuing the urban space with a sense of untraceable dread –
it’s clear the auteur has a slightly troubling view on modernity – as our fraught
‘hero’ is made to feel utterly powerless when pitted against the skyscraping
expectations of contemporary society’s modern bustle.
In some ways, Steven McQueen explores this notion of ‘urban alienation’ in 2011’s formidable Michael
Fassbender showcase ‘Shame’.
With echoes of Polanski’s ‘apartment trilogy’
(Repulsion, The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby) bouncing off the alleyway walls
somewhere in the backroom of the consciousness – Enemy is innately unsettling
without even having to do much.
Our protagonist discovers his doppelganger by happenstance,
via watching a film recommended to him by a plucky colleague.
Adam’s first viewing of the film fails to resonate beyond surface-level diversion, and
he retires for the evening in the wan light of his spartan bedroom.
Once asleep, his double returns to him in a delightfully Kubrickian
dream sequence – to the tune of a Shining-esque
musical score – all nervy, orchestral clangour.
Awake and brimming with a sort of newfound anxiety-ridden
verve, Adam returns to the specific scene in the movie that his subconscious
replayed for him – and sure enough confirms the extra in question possesses an
identical phenotype to his own.
He becomes completely and utterly obsessed with tracking
down his ‘copy’, for now, the once listless man has ‘purpose’ on his side.
And the driving force behind his agency has snuck up and
preyed on him in the most inauspicious way imaginable.
Villenueve’s cinematic gaze is a fraught and distrustful one
– with a stark approach to mise en scรจne that startles, and hammers home a gnawing
sense of forbidding desolation.
This idea of Adam being at the whim of the wiles of the world
is also vaguely reminiscent of David Hemmings’ beaten-down photographer in
Michelangelo Antonioni‘s towering magnum opus Blow Up (1966) – another universally lauded auteur known for
employing a distinctive stylistic edge.
Adam, now armed with renewed determination, eventually locates his doppelganger – a struggling actor named Anthony – after an awkwardly
handled phone call which sees Adam demonstrate the first signs of a crippling
fear caused by the now very real possibility of meeting his lookalike in the flesh.
The internal interrogation commences: What are the
consequences?
The eventual physical confrontation between the two men, in
the mildewy low-light of a decomposing hotel room, is as good a testament to
Villeneuve’s ability to expertly frame a scene as any.
Utilising an array of shots to capture the two characters
(both played by Gyllenhaal of course) within the same space, whilst still
achieving a sense of veracity, is truly marvellous to behold.
As opposed to the milquetoast Adam, we learn that Anthony is
an energetic and driven screen performer in spite of a recent career lull.
He is recently married and his wife Helen (superbly played
by Sarah Gadon) is pregnant.
We discover quickly enough, that Anthony’s history is
chequered and that he struggles with remaining faithful.
Helen harbours an
intense distrust of Anthony because of his past indiscretions– and she is
naturally incredulous of Anthony’s insistence he’s been contacted by someone
claiming to be his physical replica – instead wondering who the mysterious
person on the other end of the phone really is.
It fast becomes eerily apparent that Anthony and Adam have
complimentary character traits.
One (Adam) is sliding along with a kind of worn out torpor–
emotionally and matrimonially unattached but professionally stagnant (so free
in one sense but lacking fulfilment in another).
The other is a professional risk taker who is fettered to
domestic life.
As the tension mounts and the interactions and machinations
devised by Adam and Anthony turn more devious, it becomes unclear just who is
who, and how much of what’s going on is really the by-product of the human
subconscious in all of its wondrous infinity.
Villeneuve employs a host of recurring visual devices – and at
least one nightmarish, hirsute motif will terrify many (if not all) viewers; remember
to note the opening sequence down as one of high
importance despite its initial randomness.
Enemy is a film
requiring higher levels of engagement to unpack, as its initial ambiguities present
a host of (resolvable enough) challenges for the viewer to overcome.
The themes of control, emotional commitment, destabilising societal
expectations and mores, as well as the crushing pressures of modern life, all
collide at an intersection of insidious psychological warfare.
To what extent are Adam and Anthony connected?
What constitutes a personality?
When quizzed on the intricacies of his film, director Villeneuve
remained coy on providing conclusive answers to some of the picture’s enigmas –
and there exist entire discourses dedicated to the unravelling of Enemy’s labyrinthine plotlines.
It’s a picture steeped in Freudian symbolism and subtext –
and rest assured, some may feel cast to the cold by a film that seethes with a crawling
subterranean menace.
For the more discerning, Enemy
is a tantalising cinematic puzzle that unfolds atop a screenplay riddled with
allegory.
Operating within the bounds of a genre that may be termed
‘high rise horror’ – Enemy is tonally similar to other 21st century
films like Killing of a Sacred Deer,
Michael Haneke’s austere voyeur-freak-out Hidden,
2015’s Joel Edgerton drama The Gift, as
well as Polanski’s aforementioned apartment trilogy in all their
paranoia-soaked glory, wherein the urban space itself adds considerably to an
overarching sense of foreboding.
In what’s a churning whirlpool of concepts and conjecture, Enemy strongly taps into contemporary ideas
of ‘Being in control versus being controlled’, and the final, haunting (and
frankly frighteningly shocking) shot ties back to these themes undoubtedly.
Like the lingering images of a particularly vivid nightmare,
Enemy’s impact upon first viewing won’t
deaden for days – a phantasmagorical thinking person’s picture for disconsolate
urbanites.
Words by Jacob Dunstan
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