Several weeks ago I was having a discussion with a group of
friends about the films of Richard Linklater, and one of my friends
mentioned that they were unfamiliar with his work. I found that
surprising, and so I spent some time asking other people about directors
the liked and didn’t like, had heard of and hadn’t heard of, and found
that there were a number of directors that I consider to be absolutely
essential who are (at least in the circles I run in) largely ignored.
Starting today, I will be doing profiles of the top five filmmakers who
fit this description (I love them dearly, but very few people I know
have seen their films), with the hope that it will draw some attention
to the work of some talented artists near and dear to my heart. Today, I
will be looking at the work of the Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve.
The epigraph to Enemy (2013), Denis Villeneuve’s most recent film, comes from its source material, Jose Saramago’s novel The Double. Saramago writes that “chaos is order yet undeciphered.” This could be the epigraph to Villeneuve’s career to date. The world he sees is full of symbols, signs, and signifiers all pointing towards the realization of some truth, but their meaning is veiled. His goal is to explore the ways that we find meaning in the world, and to expose the hard limits to our attempts to gain understanding. In this, he is like a more entertaining Terrence Malick.
In Prisoners (2013), there is a scene where a search party hunts for two lost little girls in the woods at night, the camera hovering above looking down at the rings of light created by their flashlights. The lights illuminate a circle on the ground, but the border between the light and the dark is absolute. This trick of light recurs in each of the films essential scenes. Lines of sight are truncated, perspective is condensed, and the world is claustrophobic and confined. We may see only so far and not one inch further. Prisoners is, to my mind, the greatest contemporary iteration of the existential detective story (a genre whose high-water marks are Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and the novels of Saramago—particularly Blindness, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and The Double). I called Prisoners the best feature film of 2013. I stand by that. It wasn’t even close (its only competition in any genre was the documentary The Act of Killing).
Enemy (which had a very limited theatrical release, but is available at Redbox or on most carriers’ on-demand channel) follows along these same lines. It has been described as a thriller (either psychological or sexual, as if it were not possible to be both), but is more interested in the question of what makes us who we are than it is in the cultivation of tension (though it is very tense indeed, imagine if Basic Instinct had been turned up to 11 by a masterful filmmaker). It is the story of a teacher who, on the recommendation of a colleague, watches a movie whose cast includes a man who looks exactly like him. He tracks down the actor and discovers that they are doppelgangers (Jake Gyllenhaal, who seems to be Villeneuve’s muse, plays both parts). Both men are filled with intense anxiety over which of them is the original, and both want to have a taste of the other’s life, until the tension explodes into violence. Villeneuve knows just how to turn away from the source material in order to make it his own. The ending is Kafka-esque, and one of the scariest/saddest things I have ever seen. I can’t wait to see what he’ll do next.
This content appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll
The epigraph to Enemy (2013), Denis Villeneuve’s most recent film, comes from its source material, Jose Saramago’s novel The Double. Saramago writes that “chaos is order yet undeciphered.” This could be the epigraph to Villeneuve’s career to date. The world he sees is full of symbols, signs, and signifiers all pointing towards the realization of some truth, but their meaning is veiled. His goal is to explore the ways that we find meaning in the world, and to expose the hard limits to our attempts to gain understanding. In this, he is like a more entertaining Terrence Malick.
In Prisoners (2013), there is a scene where a search party hunts for two lost little girls in the woods at night, the camera hovering above looking down at the rings of light created by their flashlights. The lights illuminate a circle on the ground, but the border between the light and the dark is absolute. This trick of light recurs in each of the films essential scenes. Lines of sight are truncated, perspective is condensed, and the world is claustrophobic and confined. We may see only so far and not one inch further. Prisoners is, to my mind, the greatest contemporary iteration of the existential detective story (a genre whose high-water marks are Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and the novels of Saramago—particularly Blindness, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and The Double). I called Prisoners the best feature film of 2013. I stand by that. It wasn’t even close (its only competition in any genre was the documentary The Act of Killing).
Enemy (which had a very limited theatrical release, but is available at Redbox or on most carriers’ on-demand channel) follows along these same lines. It has been described as a thriller (either psychological or sexual, as if it were not possible to be both), but is more interested in the question of what makes us who we are than it is in the cultivation of tension (though it is very tense indeed, imagine if Basic Instinct had been turned up to 11 by a masterful filmmaker). It is the story of a teacher who, on the recommendation of a colleague, watches a movie whose cast includes a man who looks exactly like him. He tracks down the actor and discovers that they are doppelgangers (Jake Gyllenhaal, who seems to be Villeneuve’s muse, plays both parts). Both men are filled with intense anxiety over which of them is the original, and both want to have a taste of the other’s life, until the tension explodes into violence. Villeneuve knows just how to turn away from the source material in order to make it his own. The ending is Kafka-esque, and one of the scariest/saddest things I have ever seen. I can’t wait to see what he’ll do next.
This content appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll
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