Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, 2014)

[inri222]

Watched it a couple of days ago and was really impressed. So far this has been one of the best films I have seen this year.

Here is an interesting interpretation : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9AWkqRwd1I" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Dansu Dansu Dansu]

I watched this last night and thought it was merely a good-to-great movie, but the more I think about it, the more it is growing on me (much like something in the movie). First, as I believe Warren Oates mentioned, the experience of watching this film regardless of its sum total is truly a significant part of its merit. There's an intimate and private quality about this world that certainly fits its dreamlike narrative. I also agree that nothing needs to add to a concrete explanation, and much like the best of Lynch, it immediately makes sense on an emotional level even when it logically does not compute. That said,

Spoiler

I also feel they are the same person, and the conceit of the film is that his duality is expressed through two lives. On a practical level, there's no way Anthony could support his lavish lifestyle with three bit parts in local movies. Also, the apartment with his girlfriend doesn't seem complete, as if its a makeshift home (Anthony even says to Adam, "You live like this?" or something to that effect). The man who recommends the movie "Where There's a Will, There's a Way" (an ironic title for this film's fatalism) is actually hinting to Adam that he recognized him in the film and knows about his secret life. When the girlfriend asks who he is after seeing the mark of his ring, it makes far more sense that she means it in a "I don't know you anymore" kind of way rather than instantly suspecting that a doppelganger is trying to molest her, only to allow him to drive her home minutes later. And, as it has been pointed out, his mother's reaction to his story and acknowledgement of his acting career pretty much cements this idea. So, the spiders... Adam and Anthony clearly have a fear of female sexuality and intimacy (which includes having a family); the spider strikes me as a projection of their mutual disgust of women, as I believe Swo mentioned. Adam attempts to have sex with his girlfriend while she is sleeping, and Anthony attempts to have sex with, uh, his girlfriend under false pretenses. Both situations are attempting to remove the interpersonal element from sex. The sex club is the ultimate expression of this hostility and alienation towards sexuality. Letting the spider loose at the beginning of the film is setting in motion a visual motif that indicates he has always been in a trap of his own making as he attempts to wrestle with these aspects of his identity. His attempt to control this issue (symbolized by the woman crushing a spider) will inevitably fail. We see it moseying its way towards the apartment near the end of the film before anything is settled, as the result is inevitable--after all, there are limited solutions when he is dealing with himself, especially in the film's hermetic environment. So, the first time it happens, it is a tragedy, but the second time it happens, which is to say, after he makes his way back to being emotionally available to his wife only to see the Unica key (a nod to Notorious), which suggests an easier option and starts a new (yet old) lie in order to explore it, then it becomes a farce. That's why the Walker Brothers song seems out of place, as if its trivializing the ending, because it is. History repeating is the pathetic farce of our fallible nature and finite possibilities.

[domino harvey]

Lots of interesting theories here, and I appreciate the effort, but ultimately this film comes off as an entirely futile exercise in intentional crypticism. Some of the best puzzle films have degrees of narrative obfuscation on par with this film's-- Innocence, L'Annulaire, Mulholland Dr, Upstream Color-- but with those the proposed theories or personal explanations were able to be read and worn comfortably by the film we all see. Here, nothing fits well, and it's because the film has removed or confused some crucial step of the process in its efforts to be inscrutable. I don't think the mark of a great film is its ability to generate a wide swath of interpretations-- I'll take one reading that fits over a dozen that don't. And the film itself is so underwhelming, to steal the apt term from earlier in the thread, that it barely invites as close a look as it's receiving here.

As far as what's left to appreciate in the piss-colored goings-on, I thought Jake Gyllenhaal did a good job with his dual roles, especially the awkward pauses and hesitancy of his associate professor (though he does such a good job that it becomes utterly impossible to accept the myriad readings of the film which attempt to reconcile both characters as the same person). And Sarah Gadon does even better work playing the only identifiably human person in the mix. Melanie Laurent however is utterly wasted here and I have no idea why she even signed on-- perhaps some early, possibly more conventional version of this script gave her more to do? The recurrent spider imagery seemed cheaper and cheaper with each iteration (leading to that desperate-feeling finale), and I do have to chuckle at some of the incredulous responses questioning the crush fetish club's existence-- have y'all never seen SVU (or that episode of the Practice where Henry Winkler played a much more sinister doc than the one he plays on Parks and Recreation)? Overall, I'd be willing to reevaluate it upwards if I could be convinced this was anything more than a slick but ultimately rather juvenile attempt at making an insta-cult classic.

EDIT: And just because the thread could use more windmill tilting, here's another interesting but not quite there reading of the film as an anti-dictatorship parable, which like all of these theories does make sense if you just ignore a bunch of the other stuff that happens in the film