Team FYC: Enemy for Production Design
Sunday, December 7, 2014 at 1:30PM Editor's Note: We're featuring individually chosen FYC's for various longshots in the Oscar race. We'll never repeat a film or a category so we hope you enjoy the variety of picks. And if you're lucky enough to be an AMPAS, HFPA, or Critics Group voter, take note! Here's Jason on Enemy.
Toronto is a city always standing in for other places; I grew up about two hours from it and I've visited many times (I love that I saw David Cronenberg's Crash, filmed in that city, on a downtown screen there since it wasn't playing anywhere closer to me) and I've always described the town as "New York City, but clean." It is a bit sterile, a lot cold (I refer you to Cronenberg again - where else could he possibly call home?), a bit personality-free. So what better place to set Denis Villenueve's Enemy, a dark nightmare of doubles, then?
Jose Saramago's novel The Double, on which the film is based, is of course set in Portugal but more importantly it spends big chunks carrying its characters off to the countryside; Enemy however never makes it out of downtown Toronto -- there is no "out of Toronto." The city seen from far above floats between the Great Lake on one side and tundra or mist or maybe just the edge of the known world on the other; meanwhile the streets are webbed with trolley-wires and the buildings all seem like computer renderings half-finished. We see people walking the streets but they have all the presence of the ghosts haunting The Matrix, and the expressways seem to endlessly circle around in a Truman Show like loop.
Enemy came out just before Under the Skin and I think Glazer's (beautiful, unforgettable) film slinked off with some of its surreal cache, but they do feel like brother and sister in (eight) arms to me - an alien pas de deux of men and women rising up out of and sinking down into black and brown surfaces. The world that Production Designer Patrice Vermette (previously nominated for an Oscar for The Young Victoria in 2011) crafts for Jake Gyllenhaal to get quite literally lost in, two times over, is seductively detailed under the hang of that yellow Soderberghian fog - the fans of arachnid legs hanging as window treatments or a women's hair; the classrooms and hotel hallways and barren shadowed shelves of bachelor pads sliding under liquid amber; the concrete columns and dark woods, hard things, that somehow manage to feel fecund, prepared to burst, with lord knows what. Everything leans in.
All in this cold sterile city, a mask of sanity (or more aptly a motorcycle helmet, detailed with arched limbs) is preparing to slip, to strike - Enemy gives Toronto this magnificent frightening face all its own (under the other) by reveling in its too-smooth details and painting them strange, other, off. A pair of curved towers twisting, you might even say pulsating, above, and the pregnant woman stalking their inside, washing her belly in the featureless shower's steam expectantly - what else could possibly fill up these rooms but lord knows what in the shadows?
Related
Nathaniel's Review | Other FYCs
Art Direction, Canada, Denis Villeneuve, Enemy, FYC, Jake Gyllenhaal
Reader Comments (7)
I hate to be that guy, but the film does make its way out of Toronto; I recall Jake Gyllenhaal's character does make a stopover in Mississauga at one point. I only bring it up because that's my hometown!
MDA yes sorry I know Mississauga, it's where the shapely towers are and I think the hotel that they stay at -- I guess I just thought of it as a suburb of Toronto. WIkipedia says this though:
"Initially developed as a suburb of Toronto, Mississauga's growth is attributed to its proximity to that city. It is the largest suburb in Anglo-America by population.[3] In recent decades, having attracted a multicultural population, the city has initiated the development of a full-fledged downtown core and shaping its new identity as a distinct city from Toronto, and distance itself from its running joke as being just suburbia."
So I guess I'm out of date! ;)
JA - i just wanted to say that i liked this movie but NEVER considered it for this kind of prize and found this writeup really fascinating. Made me want to see the movie immediately again and i have the screener right here so...
Wisely stated.
Ja & MDA - Let's be honest here, and no offense intended, no one really thinks of Mississauga as a separate city. (Even though it really is.) I say this as someone who lives in a different suburb of Toronto, which is also technically a city with its own mayor and airport and such. But really, we all live in "Toronto".
This was a great read, JA!
This cold and gray Toronto is in direct contrast to the light and sunny Toronto of What If, filled with bohemian shops and cafes, food markets, three-story brick row houses, lakeshore walkways, etc. It just shows how important production design is to overall mood.
Finally saw this tonight and this suggestion is brilliant! Memo to academy: see it.