Enemy
Director : Denis Villeneuve
Cast : Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon
Length : 90 minutes
Country : Canada, Spain
Enemy is inspired by the novel The Double written by the Nobel Prize winning author José Saramago. It tells the story of a teacher, Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), who, while watching a film on his laptop, discovers that one of the actors, Anthony Claire, looks exactly like him. Adam, hoping to change his uneventful life, tries to set a meeting with Anthony who is more like him than Adam could have ever imagined.
A group of wealthy men is standing around a table in a dark room and watching a woman pleasuring herself. A second woman brings a tarantula on a silver plate and a high heel shoe itches to tread on it. The camera then reveals a pensive Jake Gyllenhaal in the background, assisting at this spectacle.
This is how Enemy starts. It is a film that uses the redundant and predictable concept of the doppelganger to elegantly express three main themes: control through entertainment and both the mistreatment and power of women. It is not a coincidence that this film is very difficult to read during a first viewing but also that it does not encourage a second one. Enemy can be traced back to the films of the 1960s: the works of Kubrick, Bergman (Persona) and Polanski (Repulsion), which were trying to open doors on the unknown.
Its slow pace, the lack of original plot and sometimes incomprehensible scenes might lead the audience to perceive Enemy as a pretentious art film. The truth is that many unintentionally ignore the clues that the director has left in the setting, the characters and in the dreamlike sequences. Toronto, for instance, is represented as a never ending city, threatening but also claustrophobic. The city, as Villeneuve has claimed, is a virgin landscape, both poetic and realistic. The yellowish colour of the film itself attempts to bring the film back to the book’s original timeline, the 1980s, but at the same time instill a sense of toxicity of the megalopolis in all its repetitiveness and smog.
The characters interpreted by Gyllenhaal are similar physically, not emotionally. The audience falls in love with both and is puzzled over which of them ought to receive more love due to their fate. It is through their blank gazes and awkward relationships with their partners that we see the fragile line between reality and imagination slowly fading.
It is a film that uses the redundant and predictable concept of the doppelganger to elegantly express three main themes: control through entertainment and both the mistreatment and power of women. It is not a coincidence that this film is very difficult to read during a first viewing but also that it does not encourage a second one. Enemy can be traced back to the films of the 1960s: the works of Kubrick, Bergman (Persona) and Polanski (Repulsion), which were trying to open doors on the unknown.
Yet it is the dreamlike sequences that leave you with an unexplainable bitter taste in the mouth. The spider allegory, for example, is compelling, but still remains the most mysterious metaphor that I have seen in years: firstly, it demonstrates the innate horror within man; an idea that society does not create enemies, but the enemy lies within us, and secondly, it raises an interesting comparison between human behavior. The tarantula in the beginning, for instance, could be a male tarantula that is now a prey of the woman and could easily be crushed under the weight of her shoe. As many know, in the arachnid world it is common for the female to eat the male after copulation, but it is widely ignored that this is not the case for tarantulas which rarely kill their partner. In this surreal passage the director already raises a comparison between women and the tarantulas, which seem to have the power to kill the male but decide not to.
Furthermore, Helen (Sarah Gadon), Anthony’s wife, is considered socially passive, because, as a pregnant woman, she has to stay contained within the house for the sake of their child. Her power over Anthony and her jealousy are deadly weapons that she can use whenever she wants; as a female tarantula, she guards the eggs and is in her most animal, dangerous and aggressive state.
Enemy is one of those films that are hard to grasp and it is only by reading about it that one could start to understand it. The sentence ‘chaos is order yet undeciphered’ that appears at the beginning of the film clearly introduces what the audience is about to go through: a puzzle with missing pieces that the director leaves in our hands. It is to us to interpret the journey or even the mind-blowing ending that scares, intrigues, but also disappoints the audience.
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