“The camera is far more than a recording apparatus. It is a means by which messages come to us from the other world.”
-Orson Welles
While Orson Welles’ words echo his own romanticism with the tradition of film, they were never truer, and in the case of Enemy, they may be truer still. Director of two Oscar-Nominated films, 2010’s Incendies and also this year’s family tumult Prisoners, Denis Villenueve's newest - and undistributed, as yet - is more than 40 minutes shorter and patently more mischievously exquisite than both previous efforts. In Enemy, Villenueve shows us his bent for the absurdist-maniacal, and the world his cinematic language elicits is why Enemy is getting the Cronenberg/Lynch-ala-Freud parallel that so many viewers draw.
After a portentous superwide slow pan of Enemy’s Toronto location - the shot seems to serve as a vague warning of what is to come more than to establish setting - the film continues with a bizarre and lascivious scene in a decadent den of iniquity such as that from Claire Denis’ Bastards, (only here, it’s tarantulas on dinner platters) in which women gyrate sexily to an assortment of ogling sketchmeisters. One of these oglers is the purpose of the story.
Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal's Adam Bell, a seemingly down, perma-underslept college history professor, is teaching lessons on societal control. One day he has an awkward experience with a colleague who suggests a specific "local movie" as a bit of entertainment. Bell, admittedly "not a movie guy", is fair game for a distraction after all, watches the film and is blown away to see a bit part played by some actor shockingly similar in appearance.
Some redoubled incredulity and sleuthing later, our hero (?) Bell contacts this doppelganger of his: a bland, toolish guy - Gyllenhaal's St. Claire from the creepy opening scene - and in a fit of meek Donnie Darko anxiety, calls St. Claire’s house and talks to his wife Helen (Sarah Gadon), a woman who also resembles Bell’s girlfriend, but is bulgingly preggo), for which the real St. Claire gets a rash of shit. She thinks St. Claire is cheating on her - hmmmm - but he persists in trying to convince her. After an initial meeting at a crappy hotel - in which the men find themselves indeed duplicates, including a gnarly chest scar - Bell’s meekness turns to fear, especially when St. Claire turns Bell’s foilsome call to his wife into an opportunity to suggest swapping wives for a night. This is after St. Claire followed Bell’s stunning lover (Melanie Laurent of Inglorious Basterds) whom, as opposed to his double’s wife, recoils from his sexual advances and even quits mid-coitus) to work one day. Helen also tracks down Bell at the University courtyard one day and is beyond awestruck to find her husband was not lying about this remarkable lookalike.
Anthony also makes a visit to his mother (Isabella Rossellini) and the duality vs sameness of his duplicate becomes a bigger question. They are in fact opposites in every intangible way imaginable, but the meeting with his mom is our next best bio-clue. The end is frightfully abrupt and will haunt audiences worldwide, yet it may frustrate, cause deeper probing or perhaps a eureka moment for readers of Kafka.
All is stark in Villenueve’s semi-avantgarde mirror-to-the-self world, and the cinematography helps take us there. Enemy was shot by Nicolas Bolduc, who was also responsible for 2013’s Oscar-nominated War Witch. Bolduc frames St. Claire as a foreboding altar ego, such as in his stalking of Bell’s girlfriend. He sits straddling his bike, like a coiled cobra, ready to launch at his prey.
Enemy succeeds not because it is a steely metaphor for the Freudian headspace about which we may fantasize, or for that matter have nightmares, but because it doesn’t wear that notion on it’s sleeve the whole time. It doesn’t reek of pretension. And when looking at this looming and experimental world Villenueve has created, and being trapped twixt these two opposite and opposing characters, we are able to receive, as Welles foretold, those messages from the other world.
-Kevin Duffey
