FILM REVIEW/OPINION – Jérémie Renier and Alma Jodorowsky illuminate a film handicapped by its too elliptical shape and the treatment of its idea, interesting at first sight but which crumbles as “The Enemy” is discovered.
The Enemy : a film for a nightmare
After the very successful Wedding, director Stephan Streker’s biggest hit to date, he is back with The Enemy, a drama freely inspired by a resounding Belgian news item. In November 2013, politician Bernard Wesphael was accused of the murder of his wife, who was found asphyxiated in a hotel in Ostend, a city and seaside resort on the North Sea. Suicide or murder, the investigation will not decide, and after several months in pre-trial detention and a trial in the fall of 2016, Bernard Wesphael is acquitted for the benefit of the doubt.
It is this notion of doubt that Stephan Streker places at the center of his motives, thus relating the same event. Louis Durieux (Jérémie Renier) is a charismatic, young and popular Belgian politician, destined for high office. But during a passionate and drunken night in Ostend, he finds his wife Maeva (Alma Jodorowsky) dead, a plastic bag around her head.
What happened ? He himself doesn’t know it, doesn’t remember it, or else he pretends. All in dreamlike ellipses and flashbacks, The Enemy captures with often a pretty photograph a form of cruel parenthesis, a very real drama but which escapes all.
A great performance by Jérémie Renier
Both protagonist and antagonist of The Enemy, Jérémie Renier takes on a new ambiguous and dark role, after Slalom and Albatross. We feel that the actor, under his blondness and his originally angelic eyes, has embarked on an exploration of evil, imperfection, and inner violence that man will never get rid of. He’s on almost every plane. Only he has the key to Maeva’s death and, given his office and his popularity, he then seems more likely to be believed than a simpler litigant.
In pre-trial detention, he shares his cell with an inmate, Pablo, who first claims to be guilty of drug trafficking. Successful sequences for a relationship that is established between the two men, and still defines a space of confidences. But what is, again, the part of lies and what is that of the truth?
Jérémie Renier succeeds brilliantly in his performance as an enigmatic individual, crushed by a sincere love, sincere as his absence of memory seems to be. He never excludes having perhaps committed the death of Maeva, but as he also says to himself – and we believe for a long time – unable to have done so. Embodying doubt is not the easiest mission, and the actor pulls it off wonderfully.
But clinging to a character irremediably locked in doubt, and without distancing the staging, the spectator also finds himself there…
A film without progression
One wonders what is the first objective of Stephan Streker. Documenting a news item through an intimate drama? Exploring toxic masculinity? Offer a reflection on good and evil? No doubt some of these different perspectives, but to synthesize them The Enemy sins greatly by the absence of a real investigation. Whether it is legal, psychological, or whether it relates to the very narration of history – Jérémie Renier is in fact the false and unreliable narrator of the film – the investigative dimension does not exist in The Enemy.
If the ellipses and the staging of doubt constitute an interesting film object, this story is sorely lacking a meaning, a direction. Hence, as a result, the uselessness of the interventions of secondary characters such as that of his lawyer (Emmanuelle Bercot) or his son (Zacharie Chasseriaud). These two actors do the job, but their characters should create the necessary distance for a more detailed analysis of Louis’ career, which unfortunately does not work.
Dissolved doubt in an incomplete film
Who is The Enemy ? He is everyone, in each of us, he is this part of darkness and violence that no one can ever completely get rid of. Stephan Streker’s film tends towards this affirmation and stops there. By choosing to leave the entire moral matrix of his film to the character of Louis Durieux, the director forgets to more clearly characterize the character of Maeva, an almost spectral figure and, conversely, develops more intensely that of Pablo.
Alongside Jérémie Renier, Félix Maritaud thus delivers the other great performance of the film, all in harmful energy and duplicity. Two men, two detainees in real life as detainees in their lies, whom everything opposes, but who find themselves in…
