FILM REVIEW: ENEMY

Adam and Anthony (both played by Jake Gyllenhaal) in Enemy.

A bed of two naught(s)-y boys

By Ed Rampell

Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve's Enemy is a topsy-turvy doppelgänger tale about dual identity with a weird psychosexual subtext and William S. Burroughs and/or Franz Kafka-esque vibe.

As Adam, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a rumpled nebbish of a history professor at a college in Toronto, where he is seen lecturing a class. The absent-minded professor (who even shows up late for a class) is holding forth on how dictatorships use entertainment to maintain control. During a break a colleague recommends that Adam see a movie with the portentous (if not pretentious) title, Where There's a Will, There's a Way, which he proceeds to rent. 

Much to his astonishment, Adam discovers that one of the actors in a minor role named Anthony St. Claire (Gyllenhaal) looks exactly like him. (For those keeping score in the symbology department, while “Adam” can obviously refer to the first man, “Claire” can be translated from the French to mean “clear,” as in see-through.) 

One of the great mysteries of this movie is that the nerdy Adam actually has a hot looking blonde lover, Mary (Melanie Laurent), although their relationship and sex life does not seem to be very satisfying to either partner. In any case, after viewing his alter ego in Where There's a Will, There's a Way Adam appears to try to force his will on the sleeping Mary by having anal sex with her, which the awakened, irritable Mary interrupts. Then she angrily dresses and departs.

Adam then embarks on an obsessive odyssey to track Anthony down, using deception in his detective work. He finds out that the actor has a wife who -- like Mary -- is young, blonde and beautiful. However, Helen (Sarah Gadon) is at least six months pregnant. In the dialogue Mary mentions that Anthony has been unfaithful to her, which suggests that it might have been him at the sex club, and not Adam.

In any case, when Adam finally comes, literally, face to face with Anthony, the bit part actor appears to be more like a doppelgänger in the sense of an evil twin, than just a mere look alike. When Anthony rides his motorcycle he wears a full face helmet with opaque visor, which makes him look like some sort of an insect. Indeed, bugs, in particular arachnids, are a surrealistic element of this increasingly complicated, convoluted, creepy story. In a key scene the cracks formed by the broken glass in a mirror allegorically resembles a spider’s web. (Paging Peter Parker!)

Eventually the two men try to deceive their women, switch sex partners and so on. Will the duplicates dupe each other and their women? As the natural order of things is inverted and upturned, all Hades breaks loose.

Adam and Anthony wonder how it’s possible for them to look so much alike. Were they Siamese twins separated at birth? To try and find out Adam visits his caustic, bitchy mother, nastily, coldly played by Isabella Rossellini, who appears to be a painter. Perhaps this is another clue as to what it all means -- just as actors create roles, painter’s render images, while historians examine the past. The fact that a father is never glimpsed may also be significant. 

Based on the 2002 novel, The Double, by the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author José Saramago, with the screenplay by Javier Gullón, to tell you the truth, your addled reviewer is not really sure what Enemy is all about and what it means. 

FILM REVIEW: INCENDIES

Nawal (Lubna Azabal) in Incendies.

Before the Rain

By Don Simpson

After their mother Nawal’s (Lubna Azabal) death, twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are faced with a puzzle that they must solve in order to fulfill their mother’s last will and testament. According to their mother’s most recent employer (Rémy Girard) — a notary who was designated as the will’s executor — two letters must be delivered, one to their father and one to their brother. This is a puzzle because Jeanne and Simon assumed that their father was long dead and this is the first time that they have ever heard about the existence of any siblings.

Simon wants nothing at all to do with their lunatic mother’s crazy mind games, so it is Jeanne (quite purposefully a mathematician, therefore a staunch believer in absolute answers) who embarks upon the journey from Montreal to the fictional city of Daresh — which is located in an unnamed Middle Eastern nation (probably Lebanon) — in search of their family’s roots and to fulfill their mother’s postmortem wishes. As Jeanne digs deeper into Nawal’s past she discovers a woman she never knew existed. For starters, Jeanne discovers that Nawal’s memory is very much alive in Daresh — but not in a good way — as Jeanne is told by the local women, “You are not welcome here.” Not a good start. Meanwhile, the audience witnesses Nawal’s past by way of flashbacks, causing the past and the present to run parallel to each other in the context of the film's narrative.

Nawal’s life as a Christian living in the Middle East is marred by tragedy: she witnesses the murder of her unborn child’s father at the hands of her own family; she gives birth to the child, whom she then has to abandon immediately; she is the lone survivor after a bus of Muslim women is shot up and burned by Christian nationalists (who flaunt images of the Virgin Mary on their machine guns -- oh, the irony); she assassinates her homeland’s Christian nationalist leader; she endures endless rapings, by the same prison guard, while incarcerated in prison.

By never naming the Middle Eastern nation, writer-director Denis Villeneuve purposefully avoids any sense of historical specificity; he cares more about focusing on the endless cycles of violence in the Middle East. Villeneuve takes aim specifically at the religious influences on the violence. Nawal is a modern woman of Christian descent in an Arabic-speaking country. As a direct result of the fate of her baby and baby-daddy, Nawal grows to hate that the nationalist cause is being waged in the name of Christianity. The personal becomes political as Nawal joins the Muslim opposition’s militia and becomes a political assassin in the hope of retrieving her son (who has presumably been kidnapped by Muslim soldiers during a raid on the Christian orphanage in which he was held). To further signify her wavering religious identity and allegiance, Nawal alternates between wearing a Christian cross and a Muslim head scarf -- depending on which religion plays to her advantage at that specific moment in time.

It is worth mentioning that Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated film (it lost to In a Better World) -- which was adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s stage play of the same title -- opens as young Middle Eastern boys queue up to have their heads shaved, signaling their initialization as soldiers, to the soundtrack of Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army”. This is a brilliant use of “You and Whose Army." Other Radiohead tunes are found sprinkled throughout Incendies, but none work quite as well as this one.