REVIEW: Enemy (2015)

Enemy is a film that is not bothered about the ‘anxiety of influence.’ Director Villeneuve and writer Gullón display such a fondness for other films that it is difficult not to feel it rubbing off. Before the film is even ten minutes in, we are solidly in the world of both Cronenberg and Lynch. The rest of the film is a puzzle that is left for you to decipher at your own leisure.

Adam is a history lecturer, who teaches about the controls of dictatorship and yet lives a fairly bare existence himself, rotating between teaching, commuting and having joyless sex with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent). Having rented and watched a film that a colleague has recommended, Adam suddenly jerks awake, convinced that he has seen his double in a bit part actor in the film. He becomes obsessed with finding this person, a search which sparks, to say the least, an identity crisis.

Enemy feels like a film from that brief period of time after Donnie Darko that saw a surfeit in similar puzzle films, from The Machinist to Primer. Largely eschewing traditional plotting and characterisation in favour of plotting, some of these films were maddening and some were quite good fun – Primer was particularly enjoyable. Enemy is instead all about the mood. It is a grim, greens-and-yellows detective story that withholds enough to make a puzzle out of itself without ever distracting from its overall vaguely Hitchcockian tone. There are several interpretations about what the whole thing is about (and a good few of them sound rather silly), but the real value of the film is that it gets an edgy, searching, eerie feel without ever having to sacrifice it to some series of revelations and a villain to be beaten. It is a film about asking questions, not one about finding answers, and it is all the more interesting for that. It is told with an invention and élan, which keeps you interested, even if the film’s examinations of identity, uniqueness and fidelity appear to boil down to an episode of Wife Swap.

Jake Gyllenhaal gives a great performance, playing two characters with slight differences. Most of the eeriness of the film comes from the fact that Adam and Anthony are so similar in small ways, as opposed to total opposites who usually encounter each other in films of this sort. Gyllenhaal then is tasked with playing two different characters who have to be both different and the same. He pulls it off well. Mélanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon have less to do (these kinds of films all too often favour men), but turn in convincing performances as women watching the men (or man) in their live falling apart.

In summary, good, unsettling fun – up until the ending, which is, unfortunately, a touch too smugly odd. This complexity, more stylistic than anything, will be disappointingly missing from Villeneuve’s other 2015 release, Sicario.

DVD REVIEW: Scanners (1981)

David Cronenberg’s early cinema was largely an exploration of body horror, a subgenre that dealt with infections and other invasions of the body usually with state-of-the-art special effects. Cronenberg’s first two features dealt explicitly with viruses, while The Brood and Scanners were much more about mental disorders that had disturbing physical manifestations. Cronenberg’s best body horror films, Videodrome and The Fly, married these two strains and coupled them with an intriguing philosophical approach. Scanners is an early suggestion of the great things that Cronenberg would go on to do, but it remains interesting in its own right.

Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is a rootless derelict who is captured by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan, who gives a great hammy performance as a scientist just on the verge of madness), who believes he can help him. Cameron has a severe mental condition; he is a Scanner, which means he can hear people’s thoughts and enter their minds through telepathy. Evil Scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) is recruiting people like Cameron in order to take over the world. Ruth recruits Cameron to find Revok and kill him…

If you know anything about Scanners, it has probably got something to do with the scene in which Darryl Revok causes another Scanner’s head to explode. The film was originally marketed on the shock value of this scene, with a teaser trailer that showed the preview audience’s reaction. The anecdote of how the brutally realistic head-explosion was achieved is recounted on all five of the cast and crew interviews on the DVD. One could be forgiven for thinking that there is little else of interest in the film itself apart from that one short, early scene.

However, if the head-explosion quickly and inevitably loses its shock value, the film is still not devoid of interest. Cronenberg’s films have always been powerfully visceral and Scanners is remarkably successful at conveying the gruesome tactility of the telepathy at work, visualizing the invisible mental processes of its characters. In the much more impressive final sequence, in which Cameron and Revok have a battle of the minds the marks of the battle appear physically on the body. This idea refers to the mind-body problem, most specifically to Cartesian dualism, in which it is believed that the mind can exert control over the body. In Scanners, scanning someone can increase their heart rates, cause their veins to burst or, as we know, make their head explode. Indeed, the mind might even become so powerful that it becomes independent of the body and jettisons it, leaving it to burn into smouldering ash.

Aside from an emphasis on visceral horror and the latest (for the time) special effects, Cronenberg is primarily interested in addressing philosophy. Though Scanners is much more of a horror movie and a thriller than a rigorous exploration of certain channels of thought, it does make for an entertaining and nasty film that is full of interesting ideas. It is also of interest as an early sign of what Cronenberg went on to be – his latest two films, A Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis, are largely dialogue-driven though at times the old head-exploding Cronenberg shows through. Similarly, the film is a surprisingly successful mix of arthouse and exploitation, in which the crowd-pleasing money shot might double as the conclusion to a chain of thought. The result is a film that can be thoroughly entertaining and intellectually stimulating.

That said, the film is far from flawless. Cronenberg here is much more interested in making an exploitation horror film than an arthouse film and it does show in the film’s high quotient of shoot-outs and violence, often at the expense of plot or character. As well as this, Cronenberg is not yet as in control of his medium as he would later be. In comparison to his best films, Scanners often feels clunky and amateurish. Stephen Lack and Jennifer O’Neill are rather bland leads. Lack, an artist rather than an actor, has great eyes for the role but little else. McGoohan and Ironside have great fun, though their performances suggest that they thought the script was so much pap and was not to be taken seriously. Cronenberg is noticeably absent from the interviews on the DVD, suggesting that he has moved on from and might even be embarrassed by the film. Scanners can be considered as Cronenberg’s last film in his exploitation period since his next film was the much more arthouse and thoroughly mind-bending classic Videodrome.

Scanners is a decent horror film, an entertaining mystery-thriller with an exploding head and a fantastically visual mind battle, which will divide its audience between those who will laugh and those who will think it effective. The film defies easy categorization, and remains an effective early entry in the back catalogue of one of the most interesting and visually powerful filmmakers working today.

See also:

A Dangerous Method

Cosmopolis

From Beyond

REVIEW: Cosmopolis (2012)

     

  As we have seen with David Cronenberg’s last great film, Crash, a world saturated with modernity and objectification (read shiny, metallic surfaces) is a world devoid of warmth and emotion. Where Crash works as a moody, almost-futuristic fantasy, Cosmopolis tries to be broader and, oddly, more recognisably down to earth.

  Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson, doing rather well despite being cast presumably only for marquee value) is a young billionaire who has everything he wants. He jumps into his cork-lined and impenetrable limousine and travels through the city in search of a haircut. On the way, he has one-on-one meeting with a variety of advisors, their talks becoming increasingly philosophical. He also meets his new wife Elise Shiffrin (Sarah Gadon) for a variety of meals, their relationship unconsummated and stalled. He also meets Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), a disgruntled ex-employee who is dedicated to killing Packer in order to give his life meaning.

  Like Cronenberg’s previous, A Dangerous Method, the film is primarily a talking piece. Cronenberg has lately become committed to the idea that film need not especially be a visual medium and that images of people talking are of equal import. The conversations in Cosmopolis are stilted and deeply intellectual, taken largely from Don DeLillo’s original 2003 novel – which now seems remarkably prescient in view of the subsequent economic collapse. The film contains a philosophical and economic critique of the modern world in which young billionaires have two elevators, which they choose between depending on their mood and everyone keeps an eye on the rises and falls in the stock market like more spiritually-minded people would keep an eye on tea leaves. The intellectual conversations range from the fascinating to the almost incomprehensible, delivered with a palpable coldness and near total insincerity. His theory coach, Vija Kinski (Samantha Morton) trains him on philosophical matters, pointing out that money has become so abstract that “it talks to itself”, and, hence, people are almost obsolete. She criticizes a society fascinated by wealth, but she does not seem to be bothered by it all that much, her intellectual talk becoming exactly that. That Packer might slowly be returning back to humanity is reflected in how he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with other peoples’ inane conversations.

  The film is about a world in crisis, on the brink of economic ruin but with no alternative and no place to go. Even the protesters are ineffectual with one particularly destructive and anarchic riot quickly cleaned up and forgotten. Even the famous André Petrescu (Mathieu Amalric, delivering one of the film’s few funny performances), an anarchist prankster, acts for his own camera crew, but does not have any valid point to make. The view of the world from inside Packer’s sound-proofed limousine seems faraway and unreachable, the life outside moving in a graceless silence as if it is all playing from a television on mute. If Packer is getting tired of his lot, the film makes clear that there is little else for him to do. Though unreachable, however, the world outside feels remarkably and horridly familiar as it clearly refers to the economic collapse and the Occupy movement, even to the notorious incidence of the self-immolation of the Vietnamese monks. Unlike Crash, it becomes increasingly clear that Cosmopolis is about our world and not necessarily some post-human future.

  The film is a hard film to like, ultimately because there are none of the typical pleasures associated with escapist cinema nor are there any clear-cut messages or arthouse gimmicks. Cosmopolis is a very esoteric and somewhat unique film, which is difficult to categorize and even harder to qualitatively appraise.

  However, the film does reach a fascinating and rather moving climax, with an extended conversation between Packer and the Mark Chapman-like Levin, introduced with Levin actually saying, “Let’s sit and philosophise together.” Silly as that may sound, the film develops into a conversation about finding meaning in one’s life and gaining the ability to feel again. Giamatti gives the film its sole believable and human performance, capturing with great honesty and subtlety a man who has nothing and who no longer knows himself. It all sounds very arch, but in the context of the rest of the film, coming as it does at the end, it works very well. The arthouse prerequisite ambiguous ending notwithstanding, Cosmopolis does develop into something much more thought-provoking and, surprisingly, moving, something more than the rest of this very strange and very cold film. It feels almost triumphant in a weird and incalculable way.

  Cosmopolis is practically impossible to like and it is far from entertaining, but it is a work that reminds us that film is a versatile medium, one that is expressive in more ways than we would probably want. Cosmopolis does not really tell us anything encouraging about our world, or ourselves but it is a film with courage behind its convictions and a near fearless rebuttal in a mainstream film culture that is becomes increasingly safe and unsurprising. Cosmopolis is ultimately a film that is hard to get out of your head after you have seen it, whether or not you are willing to engage with its ideas.

REVIEW: Incendies (2011)

  Incendies is a film by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, which was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, losing out to Susanne Bier’s In A Better World. Set in and around the Israeli conflict, the film, not unlike Samuel Maoz’s fantastic Lebanon, considers the human effects of the conflict over the conflict itself.

  The story follows two siblings (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) as they journey to the Lebanon to uncover their dead mother’s (Lubna Azabal) past. She has left them two letters, one for their father and another for their brother, whom they did not know existed. As they try to deliver these letters, the film intercuts between them and their mother’s life as she moves from country girl to assassin to political prisoner.

  The film is set in the midst of political upheaval and frequent violence. With its slow pace and its preoccupation with females in war-torn landscapes, a sense of lose is most prevalent. Violence is sporadic and filmed with an eye for realism rather than the exploitation of clearly engineered set-piece filmmaking. Trauma and memory are the film’s themes and it deals with them with a lot of respect. Intriguingly, the film does not specify the location it is set in, giving the film an apolitical stance. It carefully avoids a bias in any direction, preferring instead to remain a deeply personal work. As well as this, the film is relatively slight in sentimentality for the majority of its running time. As for the performances, Lubna Azabal powerfully portrays a woman lost in the conflict and unsure of where she stands. Désormeaux-Poulin and Gaudette have the more thankless roles but are well equipped to make their characters much more than just mere ciphers.

  One of the films more odd features is its refusal to be just another wartime melodrama. From its unspecified space and the rather out-of-place though strangely effective Radiohead music video sequences, the film tries to dodge categorization and the stagnancy of similar Oscar dramas. These touches do not always work but they are an interesting feature in the film.

  Unfortunately, the film comes to increasingly resemble a trashy melodrama with plot twists that change everything that as gone before. These twists are hopelessly contrived, though admittedly possible given the situation, and hamper the carefully low-key and human drama that has come before. They feel like a major third-act diversion, in which the film drops its themes and preoccupations for the sake of an emotional peak at the close. The film never really recovers and it is a real pity, downgrading the work to a ‘good’ film when it should have been ‘great.’

  Though the film never recovers from its lapse into ‘TV Movie of the Week’ histrionics, it remains an interesting film in which the destruction wrecked on the landscape mirrors the destruction done to the inner landscapes of the characters. A sensitive work that never feels exploitative of its situation or characters, it engenders a feeling of good faith that sees it through its less successful moments.

REVIEW: Adoration (2008)

  Adoration is the new film by Canadian-Armenian auteur Atom Egoyan, a director held in high regard by the art house crowd. His latest is a puzzle box of a movie that looks at terrorism with a complex and thought-provoking approach. It tells the story of Simon, a student, raising a kafuffle when he presents the tale of a botched act of terrorism as the work of his own father. Egged on by Sabine, his French teacher, he develops the story, which spreads across the internet. Opinions get more and more reactionary and the situation soon spirals out of control.

  Along with Egoyan’s pedigree and the production company’s name-Ego Art Films- the opening scenes of the film suggest that we’re in for something challenging. And, initially, that is what we get. The ever-present chat room becomes a verbal battleground in which a variety of people express their opinions on the subjects of terrorism, martyrdom and the importance of The Cause. Tension increases along with the heat of the debate, which culminates in a scary neo-Nazi voicing some vitriolic opinions. And then…the whole matter disappears and Egoyan begins what could be an entirely different film.

  The problems with Adoration are manifold. First of all, the achronological narrative raises the question, “If this film was shown with the events in chronological order, would it make it much less interesting?” The opinions are powerfully put forward but, despite the contradictory messages, they all sound like one voice: Egoyan’s. The film could easily be a comprehensive lecture on the different insights into terrorism with Egoyan a schizophrenic preacher. The problems multiply with the films gear shift.

  Now, a second and third film emerges from the first. A drama about the prejudices within multi-racial Canada takes centre stage briefly. It’s speedily dispatched by Film #3, an ‘unhappy families’ melodrama. A diner scene brings to light some unlikely twists (the scene itself interrupted by a discrepancy over taxi fare for a reason that completely escapes me) which opens p some new aspects in the story. The terrorism theme is lost amid the shiny new exploration into the nature of truth and of remembering the dead. Guilt appears briefly too, in order to give one actor a chance to stare significantly into the middle distance before that too disappears completely.

  Then, the film ceases even to be an art film (by which I mean a film of ideas and subtlety) evolving into a saccharine melodrama of the cheesiest Hollywood standard. A frankly hilarious romance scene in which the neck of a violin becomes a phallic symbol marks this shift, and the film becomes more and more ridiculous, ending on a note so squirm-inducingly corny that you eye the available exits waiting for that fade out and firs end credit with mouth-watering anticipation.

  After an opening that promises some intriguing cinema, it soon becomes clear that Egoyan wrote several scripts and shuffled them all together. An odd experiment that I hope he never repeats. An unfocused and disappointing film.