Cine-therapy

Back to work for Jake.

After trading the chance of near 80 January days in LA for the cold and wind and snow of winter in NYC, (remember he's a New Yorker now), he is heading to where winter is not just a season this weekend.

Jake will be joining Denis to discuss An Enemy as part of a showcase of 10 Canadian made films. They will be discussing the movie on Sunday, Jan 5th.  (Hopefully the airports will be back on schedule - it will be a heck of a winter road trip - and that's without the Ford Focus factor).

There is a recent review of  Enemy from Film.com.

Giving it a great review it also reveals it has one of the scariest endings on film, but it goes on to describe the crux of the movie.

 "its strange but simple narrative almost exclusively devoted to pitting male fear against male desire in a horrifying war of attrition. Likely to prove far more compelling for thirtysomething men than any other demographic, “Enemy” is first and foremost an extended allegory for male infidelity and the permanent residue of guilt that it can leave in its wake."

The review also addresses how well Jake carved out the two distinct characters who dominated the screen without making them into caricatures of the extremes of life. 

Reading the review it seems like making this movie might have been less about filmmaking and more about an exercise in analysis that you would work through on Freud's couch. 

Could that be what drew Jake to the project?

While dark and flawed the movie seems to tap back where Jake started in his career, those complex flawed characters into complicated movies where the endings might not be the resolution with a happy ending that you would expect. (Donnie Darko, Good Girl, Lovely & Amazing) Those films that brought him to the forefront as an indie movie darling.

“ 'Enemy' is a deviously sneaky success – a blundering B-movie with a wicked bite, Villeneuve’s seedy wank resolves itself as a venomous and universally relatable portrait of how self-analysis can be the quickest road to self-harm. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but it sure is easier to live."