Across a varied career that’s ranged from vast sci-fi vistas to cramped shoot-outs and
everything in between, Denis Villeneuve has carved out a niche as a filmmaker who is as
comfortable operating in arthouse territory as he is blockbusters. His work is marked by a measured
build up of tension, characters struggling with courses of action that seem predetermined,
and the complex impact and legacy of violence. Now with the arrival of Villeneuve’s biggest film yet,
the galaxy-spanning sci-fi epic Dune, it’s time to look back at his early work
and see how these critical themes developed.
Villeneuve began his career as a documentary maker before transitioning into fiction with
two well-received features, August 32nd On Earth and Maelstrom. Despite their critical success,
they differ significantly in tone to his later work, something he has reflected on.
The first two movies I made, specifically the first one, Maelstrom, was quite arrogant
and disconnected. And was, at the time, the most successful thing I’d done. For me, at the same time,
a big failure, because I felt the movie didn't convey what i wanted to talk about.
It’s not until Polytechnique, Villeneuve’s third feature, that his signature style becomes evident.
The film is a fictionalised account of the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique mass shooting, where a gunman
killed 14 women due to his anti-feminist beliefs. Shot in stark black and white and mostly limited
to the narrow scope of the attack itself, the small scale of Polytechnique belies its poetic
nature. The camera tracks slowly down corridors, ratcheting up tension, and turns upside-down,
building an almost surreal feel that is brought crashing down to earth in moments of realistic
violence. Instead of portraying events in a linear way, the film’s structure jumps around
in time, starting with the attack itself, then moving back to before it and running up to it,
exploring its aftermath, then going back and reliving the attack again. In this repetition,
Villeneuve and writers Jacque Davidts and Eric Leca interrogate the lasting effects of violence;
the audiences relive the trauma of the attack, more and more aware of what is coming.
In Incendies, Villeneuve digs deeper into the question of what effect violence has
on its survivors. When their mother Nawal dies, twins Jeanne and Simon are instructed by their
mothers’ will to find a previously unknown half-brother, a revelation that sets off a
journey to their mothers’ birthplace and into her traumatic past. Based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad,
the film’s setting is fictional but heavily influenced by Lebanon and the civil war that took
place there between 1975 and 1990. Jeanne leaves her career as a mathematics professor behind
and travels to her mother’s country for the first time, where her outsiders’ perspective
makes it difficult to investigate.
Her travels are intercut with sections of Nawal’s life,
jumping back and forward in time and returning to key moments repeatedly.
As Jeanne and Simon
delve further into their mother’s history and are faced with indescribable, brutal truths,
the horrors of what Nawal experienced are portrayed unflinchingly on screen.
These brutal acts, combined with the complexity of the time and location shifts the story follows,
disorient the viewer and build to a central idea that some acts are truly indecipherable.
Just as Incendies ends with Jeanne and Simon re-examining themselves and their past,
Enemy focuses on a fracturing of identity.
University professor Adam lives a monotonous life, delivering the same lectures every day and
following the same routine each night. But when he spots a doppelganger in a movie, he becomes
obsessed with the other man and tracks him down. The resulting confrontation distorts both men.
This bizarre premise is underpinned by two great performances from Jake Gyllenhaal: as
Adam he’s guarded, quiet and nervous; as Anthony he’s forthright and outgoing. That sharp divide
begins to blur as, after meeting, both men start to take on aspects of each others’ personalities.
The film makes little attempt to explain exactly how the men have both come to exist as exact
doubles. At times they seem to even share life events and schedules. When Adam goes to visit
his mother, she insists he has trouble with infidelity, a trait associated with Anthony;
Other aspects of their personalities are more disparate; Anthony attends a shadowy
sex club where Adam couldn’t be more out of place. To provoke further debate,
opaque symbolism around spiders and webs recur throughout the film [cables]; in one of the film’s
more disturbing images, a distorted, arachnid creature looms over the skyline of Toronto.
Regardless of the apparent meaning behind the events of the plot, Enemy is a claustrophobic,
disturbing experience with its own nightmarish logic. Adam is often trapped, moved to the edge
of frame as the camera follows him from behind, or observed from outside; he and his double inhabit
anonymous tower blocks, meet in drab hotel rooms, or are seen through reflections and shadows.
For Adam, a confrontation with his double, or perhaps a reflection of himself,
is the catalyst for a fracturing of his identity with violent consequences.
In the distant future of Dune, the noble Atreides family are maneuvered into taking
control of the planet Arrakis, formerly the domain of their rivals, House Harkonnen.
As son Paul watches his father knowingly walk into the political trap laid for him, he begins
to experience visions as a result of Arrakis’s all-important natural resources: the drug spice,
which allows people to see the future. With its themes around predestination and unavoidable
violence, Dune is a continuation of Villeneuve’s trademark thematic concerns,
as well as an exciting new chapter in his filmography.