Enemy begins with Jake Gyllenhaal’s heavily bearded character entering a room where a group of men surround some sort of sex show. A scantily clad woman cries out in what could be either pleasure or pain. The camera pans across the faces of the men. Some seem fascinated, some seem uncomfortable, some, almost weary. Two women wearing sheer robes and high heels walk out. One woman places a Sterling silver serving tray on the floor and removes the cover to reveal a giant spider. The other goes to step on it with her high heel, and the camera cuts away. Then, things get weird…
Enemy begins with Jake Gyllenhaal’s heavily bearded character entering a room where a group of men surround some sort of sex show. A scantily clad woman cries out in what could be either pleasure or pain. The camera pans across the faces of the men. Some seem fascinated, some seem uncomfortable, some, almost weary. Two women wearing sheer robes and high heels walk out. One woman places a Sterling silver serving tray on the floor and removes the cover to reveal a giant spider. The other goes to step on it with her high heel, and the camera cuts away. Then, things get weird…
There’s no question that I loved Enemy, but I can’t say that I necessarily understood it. In that way it’s kind of like my sister. If you follow her unique thought process, she makes perfect sense, usually in hindsight. But, in the moment, her statements sometimes seem to be composed of random groups of words–like audiotape that’s been cut, tossed into the air, and spliced back together.
For instance, we were playing the word game Taboo. The goal is to get your teammates to say the word on your card, but the five words that would make it easiest to do so are also on the card and are off-limits, or “taboo.” The clue my sister gave was: “It’s a vegetable, and it doesn’t start with ‘A.’”
When the smoke cleared, her word was “zucchini” and by not starting with “A,” she meant that it starts with the opposite of “A.” That makes perfect sense… sort of.
I got the same feeling toward the end of Enemy; that the story might make sense, but that in all the weirdness, I may have missed something that was intended to steer my focus. Enemy’s more linear than a David Lynch film, an obvious comparison that’s made even more obvious by Isabella Rossellini’s presence as Jake Gyllenhaal’s mother.
Jake plays a professor, as well as an actor. History teacher Jake repeatedly lectures about patterns, and history repeating itself, and his life seems to do just that. He teaches, he eats, he drinks, he drills his girlfriend like the great state of Texas, and that’s about it. Until a colleague suggests a movie and, in it, professor Jake’s subconscious takes note of actor Jake. He’s driven to revisit a scene in the movie after dreaming about it. There in the background, easy to miss, is his exact double. He freezes the frame and compares a torn photo of himself without a beard, to his non-bearded doppelganger.
He becomes fixated on the actor, and tracks him down online. The actor Jake at first thinks professor Jake is a stalker, and wants nothing to do with him, eventually agreeing to meet in a hotel room, but not before the actor’s pregnant wife tracks the other Jake down and actually speaks with him, reporting to her husband that he’s an exact duplicate. Which isn’t surprising, because the film’s source material is Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago’s book The Double.
After that, it’s anyone’s guess what this movie is about, but it’s so artfully done, and the cinematography, direction, music, and acting strike such a consistent tone, that it’s fascinating. The film maintains almost-continuous tension for two 45-minute long segments. The bit of levity that relieves it 45 minutes in is mild but the audience erupted because of the need to vent—and it happened again toward the end of the film. It’s rare that a film manipulates the viewer as effectively and as originally as Enemy does.
The city seems to be almost void of life, and at one point a giant spider seems to be hanging over it…waiting. Several scenes are bathed in sepia tones and the odd lighting, cinematography, and the camera’s slow deliberate motion, mesh perfectly. The sets and locations couldn’t be better suited either, although few struggling actors have apartments as lush and expansive as actor Jake’s.
Scenes are sometimes viewed through closed windows with the ambient noise outside becoming music and music seeming to become ambient noise. There’s very little music overall. It adds impact to the scenes, and the camera techniques, and creates foreboding, the feeling that at any moment something may jump out. The stress and concentration of playing both sides of the scenes where the doubles meet seems to add tension and a believable degree of obsessive focus to Gyllenhaal’s performance.
His co-star, Sara Gadon, shared in an interview that Gyllenhaal said: “I think this film is really about a man who is having a crisis, and through this crisis, leaves his mistress to fall back in love with his wife.” Jake says: “It’s how he reconciles himself to make a commitment to his marriage, and to being an adult.”
In hindsight, that makes perfect sense. When professor Jake is in actor Jake’s apartment, a framed photo is shown to be an intact copy of the torn-in-half photo seen earlier. Both Jakes are beardless in the photo and bearded in the film’s time frame, which would be a pretty big coincidence if they weren’t the same person… They also have the same scar, which seems to rule out the possibility of them being twins, or one of them being a clone.
The book is significantly different from the movie, so people coming to the film from the novel will have advantages but will almost certainly be disappointed. As someone who came to the book from the movie, I thought it was wonderfully done, and recommend it to my less literary brethren, provided they aren’t afraid of spiders.
Lord Carrett