dvd of the week
In Prisoners, the Quebecois auteur Denis Villeneuve directed Jake Gyllenhaal to one of his best performances, as a cold and determined cop searching for two kidnapped girls. Enemy, based on Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s book The Double, is as austere and difficult as Prisoners was pulpy and obvious. Gyllenhaal plays two roles, Adam and Anthony. The former is a depressive history professor with an awkward relationship with both his girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent) and his mother (Isabella Rossallini). One day he watches a movie on DVD and sees a man who looks exactly like him in a small scene. He begins to stalk his doppleganger, an actor named Anthony, as well as Anthony’s pregnant wife Helen (Sarah Gadon). The mystery deepens, and the result is one of the more hypnotically beautiful mind-bending films since Mulholland Drive. Like David Lynch’s masterpiece, Enemy is not remotely clear-cut and even enraging to some. But Villeneuve’s direction, Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’s score and Nicolas Bolduc’s cinematography combine with Gyllenhaal’s brilliant performance to create something sublime, if opaque.
