Film Freak Central

TIFF '23: Seven Veils

***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Mark O'Brien
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Atom Egoyan hits his stride again in Seven Veils, a playful and self-reflexive backstage drama about the re-staging of a Canadian Opera Company production of Richard Strauss's Salome, which Egoyan, lover of complicated matryoshka-doll narrative structures and intertextuality, has twice mounted for the same company, first in 1996, then in February of this year. Footage from both of those versions becomes the obscure scene of the crime in the film, where director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried, reuniting with Egoyan after the underrated Chloe) is in the challenging process of remounting a production previously directed by her mentor and apparent groomer Charles, who integrated cryptic home movies of her ritualistic abuse at the hands of her father into the original work--video elements that, of course, were also foregrounded in Egoyan's stagings of the opera. While Jeanine is wrestling personal and professional demons to get the remounting into shape and dealing with her conservative minders at the COC, who'd rather she discard her aesthetic changes and relegate her incendiary director's note to a blog or a podcast (where, you can almost hear Egoyan snickering, it'll never be heard), props master Clea (Rebecca Liddiard) is documenting her behind-the-scenes work on her humble iPhone, inadvertently capturing another sex crime that makes her both a survivor and a potential power player.

Guest of Honour (2020)

**½/****
starring David Thewlis, Laysla De Oliveira, Rossif Sutherland, Luke Wilson
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda "He sounds like one of those people you hear about but don't see," Luke Wilson's pastor Greg tells bereaved daughter Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) early on in Atom Egoyan's Guest of Honour, laconically cutting through an exposition dump as only Luke Wilson can. Greg is drafting his eulogy for Veronica's father, the recently departed health inspector Jim (David Thewlis), for whom the film itself is a kind of prickly eulogy. A cold fish with inscrutable motives (he claims he's just working to protect the public from contamination, even as he wields his badge with extreme prejudice), Jim is the quintessential Egoyan protagonist. He's a moral question mark in a suit, like the tax auditors and insurance adjusters who have served the somewhat dimmed star of English-Canadian cinema so well in The Adjuster and Exotica. Imbued with a puckish meanness by Thewlis, Jim is the lynchpin to a modestly successful exercise that epitomizes Egoyan's annoyingly self-serious puzzle-box style, as well as, thankfully, his playfulness.

TIFF '13: Devil's Knot

**/****
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Something is off in Devil's Knot, the third film about the West Memphis Three in as many years, and it isn't just the Satanic panic that turned a bereaved community against three wrongfully-accused teenagers. Although its Tennessee setting takes him far from his usual haunt of Toronto, this material seemed like a slam dunk for Atom Egoyan, who's done his best work in films about parents dwelling in the endless hangover of their children's premature deaths. It's a shame, then, that his new film feels like a wheel-spinning exercise rather than a deepening of old themes. Egoyan's approach to this tapped-out story hits the dramatic and formal beats you'd expect from his filmography: here we get a child's cryptic, disembodied voiceover about what he's seen; there, a videotaped testimony that conceals more than it discloses. Ambiguity is the name of the game, just like in The Sweet Hereafter, where everything turns on young Sarah Polley's poker face as she ushers the adults around her into the topsy-turvy world of the title.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Ian Holm, Maury Chaykin, Peter Donaldson, Bruce Greenwood
screenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Russell Banks
directed by Atom Egoyan

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer For anyone left reeling by Atom Egoyan's Exotica, with its sexualized miasma of grief and longing lingering in the mind, the very first shot of The Sweet Hereafter is vertigo-inducing. Once again, the camera tracks very slowly from left to right as the titles appear on screen--a signal, perhaps, that more human misery awaits. Egoyan eventually alights on a scene of tranquility, as a family of three--mother, father, child--sleeps on a bare wooden floor. Beyond the stylistic link to the opening of Egoyan's previous film, I'm not sure what it is about this tableau that should be so disquieting. Partly it's the slow, deliberate camera move that brought us here. Partly it's the voyeuristic viewing opportunity. (Sleeping families are, of course, vulnerable, and the casual exposure of most of the woman's breast puts the audience in the place of intruders spying on a private moment.) And partly it's that the God's-eye P.O.V. suggests the omnipotence and indifference of the universe at large when tragedy is the subject.

Exotica (1994) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD

****/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C
starring Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Don McKellar, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer When Exotica debuted at Cannes in 1994, Atom Egoyan had already earned a reputation for curious, low-key explorations of memory and alienation. His Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, and The Adjuster leaned on video as a kind of metaphor showing how relationships become dependent on individual frames of reference that each move in only one direction--how one person's blank tape is another's cherished memory, or how one person's pornographic display is another's lifeline. Exotica represented Egoyan's commercial breakthrough in part because he found an enticing venue for those observations. It's one of the most fundamentally despairing movies that I know, and yet there is in the precision of its craft, the bravery of its conception, and the depth of its empathy something fundamentally uplifting.

TIFF '05: Where the Truth Lies

*½/****
starring Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman, Rachel Blanchard
screenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Rupert Holmes
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bill Chambers Canadian filmmakers tend to expose their limitations when they mimic American pop (see: the oeuvres of Jerry Ciccoritti and Mary Harron), and Atom Egoyan, who adapts his signature post-modernism to the Boogie Nights/Goodfellas paradigm in Where the Truth Lies, is no exception. Part of the problem is that it's almost impossible to empathize with journo Karen O'Connor's (Alison Lohman) attraction to the world of Lanny (Kevin Bacon, in what I'm tempted to call a career-best turn) and Vince (Colin Firth), a quasi-Martin & Lewis rended asunder by a scandal years before--not only because these movies are morality tales and thus must initially offer some vicarious thrills, but also because Egoyan is such a fucking Martian that his looking glass isn't perversely seductive (like, say, Blue Velvet's), only off-putting. Indeed, at the forefront of one's mind throughout Where the Truth Lies is whether Egoyan intended it to be so ridiculous, from the inscrutable casting of Firth as a Vaudevillian entertainer to the cornball "Alice in Wonderland" imagery (he even uses Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on the soundtrack as if it's maybe not a drug song) to the '70s period markers (big moustaches for the boys, big afros for the dark-skinned extras) to, my personal favourite, Lohman playing Karen as a nine-year-old by putting shoes on her knees. That being said, perhaps more disconcerting than Egoyan's failure to either beat 'em or join 'em is that after all these years, he's still making lugubrious, young-man's art that wallows in Sartrean despair. PROGRAMME: Viacom Galas

Ararat (2002)

**/****
starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The problem with Atom Egoyan's Ararat is not that it takes a hard stance about the Armenian Genocide, but that it avoids taking a hard stance about what to do with that hard stance. While the writer-director takes great pains to show how various approaches to historical memory can be twisted through suspect convention or personal hurt, he neither offers a process that might actually do the job nor feels confident that anyone could--an impasse that ironically condemns his own film to be one more body on a pile of dangerous irrelevances. So frightened is Egoyan that he'll make a mistake that he builds layer after layer of distantiation, trying to build a theoretical machine that will absolve him from the responsibility of mapping a position; the results backfire spectacularly, making the slaughter of a million-plus people, seen distantly through the film's fish-eye lens, even more of a footnote than before.

TIFF '02: Ararat

**/****
starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Bill Chambers Shuffling the picture's sequences like a deck of cards, Atom Egoyan's signature postmodernism smacks of a diversionary tactic this time in Ararat. A film about the Armenian Genocide was Egoyan's dream project, yet he maintains an intellectual distance throughout, transparently terrified of the ostensible subject matter. Drawing from his well-stocked stable of actors while tossing a few fresh faces into the mix, Egoyan casts wife Arsinée Khanjian as an art history critic named Ani, newcomer David Alpay as her son, Raffi, bombshell Marie-Josée Croze as her stepdaughter (who happens to be Raffi's lover), and Exotica vets Bruce Greenwood and Elias Koteas (in the film's most compelling performance) as actors in a docudrama being directed by Edward (Charles Aznavour) and produced by Rouben (Eric Bogosian), for which Ani is the technical advisor. (Also recycled from Egoyan's Exotica are issues with customs in a hollow framing story co-starring Christopher Plummer.) The movie-within-the-movie depicts the Turkish government's mass murder of its Armenian citizens, and unfortunately, this is our only window into that atrocity: through scenes we know to be thus in a project continually criticized by Ani for taking poetic license and looks mockingly artificial besides. The French Lieutenant's Woman gimmick perhaps says more about the stench of Oscar bait--with Greenwood's American doctor character the typical white saviour in a foreign land--than it does about anything else, and it reduces the victims of a holocaust to extras on Stage 9. More crucially, even the depiction of what is explicitly "faked" violence lacks the visceral shock of Schindler's List; politeness is no way to raise our ire or even send us to the library. (Welcome to Canada, I suppose.) Too timid to bring a sense of closure to an ugly chapter in twentieth-century history, Ararat finds Egoyan up to his old tricks with nothing up his sleeve. PROGRAM: GALAS