The two Jakes

For all the compelling enigmas permeating Quebec director Denis Villeneuve’s latest and finest film (all arachnid appearances are duly noted), there is something pleasingly unambiguous about its title. Mining an anxiety so primal as to require no explanation within the film itself, Enemy is about the terror of seeing yourself duplicated, of discovering another with your face and voice trespassing upon your singularity, a forced mirror relieving you of the consolations of uniqueness while reminding you of all your failures in this life. But it’s also, very cleverly, a movie about the psychic perils of watching movies, making it that much more apt that it features an American movie star at its double-centre. Identify with the hero at your own risk.

Loosely adapted from José Saramago’s The Double—or, to translate its original Portuguese title literally, The Duplicated Man—by Javier Gullón, Enemy follows Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), a history professor, as he distractedly goes about having unintentionally rough sex with his girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent) or lecturing on dictatorships and their control over individual expression. What’s distracting him? Maybe it’s his burgeoning depression, some new unease with his seemingly anonymous existence, exemplified above all by his boxy apartment, a place that barely seems inhabited. Desperate for even the most fleeting escape, he accepts a co-worker’s advice and rents an inane comedy on DVD. He watches the movie, goes to bed, and dreams of the movie. It’s only when replaying the movie in his dream that he recognizes the actor in the miniscule role of a bellboy. His name is Anthony St. Clair (Jake Gyllenhaal), and he looks like Adam and sounds like Adam, and Adam immediately understands that he’s no choice but to find him.

A man sees his doppelgänger in a movie. I said to be wary of identification, but the truth is that our surrogate in Enemy isn’t Adam but, rather, Helen (Sarah Gadon), Anthony’s pregnant wife, the only person in the movie able to fully appreciate the uncanny resemblance between the men. One of the smartest things in Gullón’s script is the space left in the story for Helen to occupy; one of the smartest things in the casting is the selection of Gadon, who’s of late turned up in numerous high-profile Canadian films yet never to such marvellous effect. Her Helen is both alarmed and complicit in the meeting and negotiations between the two Jakes. She’s highly active yet in a state of shocked suspension. Gyllenhaal is in excellent form, offering an array of incrementally layered reaction shots—several of which are reactions to his own actions. Villeneuve and editor Matthew Hannam allow their lead to hog the screen, as though trapped in a hall of mirrors. It’s less a stunt performance than a perfectly gauged exercise in an actor’s most solipsistic nightmare.

But the real masterstroke of Enemy might be the casting of Toronto—a sort of enemy city for many Canadians, not least among them Quebeckers. There’s not a single glimpse of Toronto’s charms or history or funk in Enemy. Instead, Villeneuve maximizes the hard, monolithic coldness of the Gardiner freeway, of the financial sector’s blandest skyscrapers, of the University of Toronto’s brutalist campus, rendering Adam/Anthony’s world one of looming eeriness and reflective surfaces. The world of Enemy is highly subjectivized, perfectly recognizable yet strange. Did it become strange because of Adam/Anthony’s chance encounter? Is this town not big enough for the both of them? 

         

Technical difficulties

We’ve gained almost exactly two decades hindsight on the École Polytechnique Massacre, on that wintry afternoon when 25-year-old Marc Lépine, armed with a knife and a semiautomatic rifle, killed 14 women and injured ten women and four men before turning the gun on himself. As attested to in statements to victims and his suicide note, Lépine was motivated by a contempt for feminism, something he seemed to possess only the vaguest notion of but which he claimed ruined his life. The abysmal stupidity of these sorts of hate crimes constitutes an enormous part of their enduring horror, so the question as to what any society can do to come to terms with events like those of December 6, 1989 remains difficult to answer. What works of art can contribute to the discussion, especially those designed to convey narrative, is equally elusive. If there’s a story in the École Polytechnique Massacre, the central character would seem to have to be Lépine, prompting further questions about what, if anything, can we learn from him.

Quebec director Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique attempts to counter this apparent inevitability by de-centralizing its narrative, dividing focus between the nameless assassin and some of those who would survive his attack. The obvious model for this circular structure is Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which dramatized the 1999 Columbine Massacre. Yet where Elephant’s formalism lent Van Sant sufficient distance to allow minimal editorializing, to encourage something closer to mediation on the event and avoid facile conclusions, Polytechnique has a difficult time steering clear of artificial parallels and generic constraints. In some senses this is, strictly speaking, a slasher movie, as well as a tale of unrequited love soaked in dramatic irony. It feels at times like a misguided version of the “God’s Lonely Man” movie, à la Taxi Driver, Werner Herzog's Woyzeck or more recently The Assassination of Richard Nixon. The slow push-ins on the face of the killer or on a print of Picasso’s Guernica are ominous without really feeling imbued with purpose or precision. The killer’s narration feels suspiciously like a filmmaker’s apologia, a way of assuring us he knows his Lépine stand-in is an idiot and an asshole. Unlike my experience of watching Elephant, I found myself wondering if Polytechnique wasn’t succumbing to form for form’s sake.

None of this is meant to dismiss the film’s value outright, particularly if we consider the difficulty of approaching such a fraught subject. Polytechnique’s compassion for the victims can be found in several smaller details, such the way a female student, conflicted about using her sexuality to secure an internship, wobbles as she walks in high heels. (Something in this subplot echoes 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days more strongly than anything in Elephant.) But it’s interesting to compare the ambitious Polytechnique to the relatively modest 1952 film The Sniper—newly released on DVD and reviewed on this blog just two days ago—a fictional thriller whose social message is secondary to its noir ambiance. The Sniper invokes compassion for both victims and killer by simply telling its story as cleanly and efficiently as possible. Of course, we watch The Sniper with very different eyes than we watch Polytechnique—the former film’s potential resonance is essentially left up to us to discover, while we can’t help but search the latter for some fragment of insight to cling to and justify its existence.

PS: Polytechnique was filmed in both French and English, ostensibly as a method of gaining a wider audience. While far from unprecedented, this approach seems especially ill-advised when dealing with a recent event as tender as the Montreal Massacre. On one hand it feels goofy to hear people speaking English in a context where the audience knows the characters are Francophone. It's difficult too, to ignore the political connotations, however beside the point, ie: these women had their lives taken, and now their language is taken as well. Like I said, you could argue it's kind of beside the point, but if you think such matters aren't attended to in Canada, you probably have never set foot in the province of Quebec.