Two men come together in a hotel room near Toronto. The day outside is flat, and the room is dim; nobody turns on the light. The men have never met before, although they have spoken on the phone. Now, at last, they find themselves face to face. And here’s the curious thing: it’s the same face.
Denis Villeneuve’s “Enemy” stars Jake Gyllenhaal, twice. His first and mousier role is that of Adam Bell, who teaches history to patently bored students. As befits someone who specializes in the study of dictatorships, he seems to be bowed beneath the yoke of an invisible tyrant. He works, eats, lives alone, walks with a mixture of shuffle and trudge, and has glumly regular sex with his girlfriend, Mary (Mélanie Laurent). A colleague suggests a diversion: “You don’t go to the movies, do you?” “Movies?” Adam replies, as if the guy had recommended foxhunting, or a bungee jump.
Nonetheless, Adam rents a film—a flighty-looking farce—on DVD, and watches it at home. And there, suddenly, at the back of a scene, is him. He’s a smiling bellhop in a pillbox hat, holding suitcases, but it’s him all right, or an actor who resembles him. (A warning to any viewers who, as a matter of habit, claim to “identify with” characters onscreen: this movie will teach you a lesson.) Using the cast list, plus Google, Adam tracks the fellow down. He is Anthony Claire, a bit-part performer with a pregnant wife named Helen (Sarah Gadon). He’s more forthright than Adam, and better dressed, and he reads motorcycle magazines rather than history books. In other respects, however, the two men match. They both live in Toronto. They have the same beard, the same voice, and the same scar on their midriff. They even have the same handwriting, which somehow feels creepiest of all. A pair of souls, in other words, armed with a single body. How can two be one? What happens when the alter meets the ego?
“Enemy” is adapted by Javier Gullón from “The Double,” by José Saramago—one of many writers who have grappled with the theme. They make a frighteningly distinguished bunch. Even if you lay aside “The Comedy of Errors,” you are left with E. T. A. Hoffmann, Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Prince and the Pauper,” Poe’s “William Wilson,” and Dostoyevsky’s “The Double”—his best book, according to Nabokov, who himself conjured up “Despair,” in which a businessman kills a tramp whom he believes, quite wrongly, to be his doppelgänger. The novel was filmed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in 1978, with a script by Tom Stoppard, and Dirk Bogarde in the lead, and the result, unsurprisingly, gave off a dandified chill. For a warmer hall of mirrors, there was “The Double Life of Véronique” (1991), Krzysztof Kieślowski’s generous masterpiece, which offered two helpings of Irène Jacob.
Now we have a couple of Gyllenhaals to play with. The actor is thirty-three, and until recently he bore the mark of boyishness. It both brightened his appeal, in zippy films like “Source Code,” and meant that his more solemn roles, in “Zodiac” and “Brokeback Mountain,” took him to the limits of his range. Finally, weathered and wearied, he looks his age. One reason, perhaps, that Adam and Anthony become mutually and manically obsessed is that each wants to know if, and how, the other has made better use of his life. The mood becomes one of jealous unease, with our heroes prowling and sparring like alley cats. Even their respective partners start to merge; both women are pale-skinned, blond, and tinged with sorrow, as if fearing that no good can come of the unearthly coincidence between their menfolk. The psychoanalyst Otto Rank thought that a person’s double could be a shadowy harbinger of his or her death, and “Enemy” seconds that view.
In a sense, Villeneuve makes this easy for himself, by placing the whole thing under a cloud. If his previous film, “Prisoners,” struck you as dungeon dark, get a load of the new one. It’s an hour shorter than “Prisoners,” which is a mercy, but it’s shot in a kind of brown and cream, with characters begrimed by the light. Architecturally, no quarter is given to the graceful or the serene: the director guides us through a panorama of hard blocks and housing developments, as his compatriot David Cronenberg did in his early work, although “Enemy” draws upon a more recent asset—Absolute World, the twinned and twisted condominium towers in Mississauga, west of the city. Completed in 2012, and stared at in wonderment by the camera, they furnish the film with its most daunting double of all.
Did it have to be like this? Must the world of a movie be so absolute? It’s near impossible, as you emerge from “Enemy,” to convince yourself that doubling might have a dashing or a funny side—remember “The Prisoner of Zenda” or Ivan Reitman’s “Dave,” in which Kevin Kline, as a mean American President, inspects his humble look-alike (the Dave of the title), and says, “You’re a very handsome man. Just get rid of the grin.” After they swap, it takes Sigourney Weaver, as the First Lady, to spot the difference, when she catches Dave glancing at her legs in the limo. Her husband would never do that. Sexual frisson is seldom far away, in tales of doubling, and you can see why: they challenge our vain assumption that erotic allure is private and unmistakable. If that can be duplicated, nothing is sacred, not even love, and so, in “Enemy,” the two men wind up exchanging partners, with Anthony seducing Mary, and Adam going to bed with Helen, who suspects the truth but seems, if anything, aroused by what it portends. Talk about a double date. Only one shock remains, in the closing scene; it yanks the movie toward Kafka, and leaves you scratching your head and other body parts. “Enemy” may crawl and infuriate, and, boy, does Villeneuve get rid of the grin. But the film sticks with you, like a dreadful dream or a spider in the bedclothes. Shake it off, and it’s still there.
One sequence in “Le Week-End” may be the best thing that Jim Broadbent has ever done. His has been an exemplary career, with supporting roles for Martin Scorsese (“Gangs of New York”) and Woody Allen (“Bullets Over Broadway”); an Oscar for “Iris”; a florid turn as the ringmaster in “Moulin Rouge”; and a long-standing loyalty to Mike Leigh. But here is something new: in closeup, we see his face contorted, though whether in pain or in pleasure is unclear. Then we get it: he is plugged into an iPod, listening to Dylan, and dancing—or passionately staggering—around the room. Without spectacles, his eyes look milky with age; he must have been young when Dylan was young. A lonely long shot frames him for what he is now: an oldster-in-waiting, standing in his underwear and his socks. “How does it feel / To be without a home,” Dylan asks, and you can see what our guy is thinking: Well, at least it might be an adventure. Or would I get lost?
All of which shows that “Le Week-End,” written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell, is far from the airy confection that the trailers, the posters, and the simpering title suggest. Broadbent plays Nick, a college lecturer, with Lindsay Duncan as his wife, a schoolteacher named Meg. They travel to Paris to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary and to ask themselves, really, what there is to celebrate. (In a fitting highlight, they make a pilgrimage to Samuel Beckett’s grave.) We get bright glances at the city, yet its glory lies at arm’s length, or beyond; the focus is squarely on the central couple, locked like struggling swimmers in each other’s embrace. Their bickering has a nasty bite, tightened by the constant cursing that marks out the educated English middle class, plus a tang of carnal excess. “That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” Meg says, as she samples a glass of wine.
Now and then, the movie jolts and re-starts: the couple tries to flee without paying a bill, first from a restaurant and then from a hotel, thus halving the comic effect. As Meg shoves Nick against a wall, like a cop manhandling a suspect, and says, “Love dies,” you start to feel exhausted by their plight. It is at this juncture, however, that help arrives, in the lanky shape of Jeff Goldblum. He plays Morgan, an old college friend of Nick’s, now living on the Rue de Rivoli, with a new French wife and a successful book to his name. Instantly, he invites Nick and Meg to a soirée. The monologue that Goldblum delivers there, grand with illusion and larded with mouthfuls of canapés, is entirely delicious—roguish and absurd, but lending the film a zest that it was in danger of losing. Later, as the story fades, Morgan joins Nick and Meg in a light-footed dance that pays homage to Godard’s “Bande à Part.” Old movies, food and drink, dead authors with much to impart, and a love that comes back to life: such are the joys, according to this uncomfortably honest film, worth setting against our disappointments, and against the many ravages that lie in store. “Think of me as falling out of a window, forever,” Nick says, but there are still some things, Paris included, that catch us as we fall. ♦
