It’s ironic that a film titled Enemy was born out of a friendship. But when the Québécois director Denis Villeneuve met the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, he immediately knew that he had found a like-minded man.
“When we sat in front of each other for the first time, we realised that we had the same needs as artists,” says Villeneuve, who previously came to the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) in 2010 with the much-admired prize-winner Incendies. “I realised that in my earlier films I didn’t have enough time to work with the actors. I wanted to create a laboratory with one actor and create a way of working. At the same time, Jake was in that moment in his life when he wanted to get out of the Hollywood system and make something silly and have some fun.”
Their solution was to adapt José Saramago’s 2002 novel The Double (another film with a similar premise, starring Jessie Eisenberg, is also screening at ADFF and is actually called The Double). The fun part for Gyllenhaal is that he gets to play two roles. First he’s the paranoid university lecturer Adam Bell, who discovers one of the actors in an obscure movie is his doppelgänger. And he also plays his double, the struggling actor Anthony Clair. Adam becomes so infatuated with Anthony that he starts stalking him, believing that they have a connection that goes beyond their remarkable physical resemblance.
Villeneuve explains: “It’s a film about the power of the subconscious, a subject that concerns me because it has a real impact on our lives and a real impact on society in general. As I read The Double, I experienced a strong sense of vertigo. Vertigo is always part of my worst nightmares, but I’m explicitly drawn to it.”
The story unfolds like an elaborate puzzle. Every time we see the Toronto sky it is a monotonous grey, which is apt as there is nothing in this intricate picture that is black and white. Can we believe anything Jake Gyllenhaal says? Or is the only truth to be found in the trio of women that lighten the picture, Adam’s girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent), his mother (Isabella Rossellini) and Anthony’s pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon)?
Keeping with the twin theme, this is the director’s second film of 2013. The other was the hugely successful Prisoners, which featured Gyllenhaal as a police officer trying to find abducted children. The chances are we will see this partnership again.
“As men, we are having the same identity crisis,” says Villeneuve. “We were asking the same questions about identity, about the women in our lives. We felt close to each other. I’m deeply inspired by him.”
• Enemy screens on Sunday at 6.30pm at Emirates Palace. For more details, visit www.adff.ae