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?
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