Friday, April 25, 2014

No Friend To Enemy

From Godfrey Cheshire's two-and-a-half star review of Enemy:

"Enemy," [director Denis] Villeneuve's latest (it was filmed between the two above-mentioned films, [Incendies and Prisoners.] though it is being released after the latter), differs from the earlier works not only in being set in Canada, but also in offering a story that's ostensibly less concerned with painful real-life struggles than with dream-like subjective perplexities.

[....] Less ambitious (and, at 90 minutes, far shorter) than those films, it's inevitably less impressive, more like a semi-whimsical short story by a master whose real forte is challenging realistic novels of epic scope.

Why does Cheshire think a film that intensely concentrates on a few people is less ambitious than two previous features that had more action and wider-ranging stories?  Breadth is not depth.  In fact, Villeneuve's previous film, Prisoners, is over two-and-a-half hours, but I found my interest flagging well before it was over. On the other hand, Enemy, for all its relative simplicity, I found much more gripping.

Even weirder is Cheshire's list of potential influences: Cronenberg, Bergman, Bunuel, Polanski, Kieslowski and Antonioni.  How could he leave out the most obvious name.  Enemy is a moody, surreal story that questions the meaning of identity.  If I didn't know better, I'd assume it's by David Lynch.

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