FILMOGRAPHY
Next of Kin (1984)
Family Viewing (1987)
Speaking Parts (1989)
The Adjuster (1991)
Exotica (1994)
WORKS
Intriguing, but subject to all the expected shortcomings one would expect of a shoestring feature made at the tender age of 24, Next of Kin (1984) is the debut of Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan. The film is essentially split into two distinct aesthetics. The first half, which establishes the story of the circumstantially apathetic youth Peter Foster and his dysfunctional and over-drawn (he’s 23) upbringing in a wealthy household, is shot with a sort of Mike Nichols classicism, but with a pretentious flair, very much like an over-read grad-student’s take on The Graduate. It fairly works, as Egoyan himself admits, largely because of the oblique, unintentional oddness of the material. It plays rather like a very intelligent young man figuring out how to shoot a picture– which is precisely what it is. The second half, however, in which Peter infiltrates a troubled Armenian family in order to play family psychologist, is shot almost entirely it utterly benign master shots. Egoyan’s intentions are clear in places, but more often the material lapses into real amateurishness. So, finally, the film is stilted, which while a snobby thing to say, is precisely what results from lopsided halves. Patrick Tierney is fairly excellent in rendering a preposterously cordial approximation of Kyle MacLachlan in Peter, who eventually becomes–an even more impossible scenario, but intentionally so– the lost son Bedros Deryan. (w: Atom Egoyan, c: Peter Mettler)
Family Viewing (1987) gives writer/director Atom Egoyan a larger budget ($150K, which is still obviously quite modest) and an opportunity to grow on the lessons of Next of Kin. You can detect growth from the first frame: an evocative continuous reveal which unfolds as trays are removed from a lunch cart, opening up a window of vision into what is essentially a split screen: Egoyan’s troubled protagonist on the left, a television playing an afternoon special on polar bears on the right. Such are the themes of the film: familial alienation, benign predatory nature, recording technology which seems to make our lives referentially fractal. Aidan Tierney has the same placid, incessantly polite countenance as his brother Patrick, and here as Van (named for the Turkish city of Armenian Resistance during the Armenian Genocide) he wishes to remove his grandmother (Selma Keklikian) from her enervating nursing home and into better care. His father, Stan (David Hemblen), is a sex addict with a penchant for video tape and phone sex. He has a live-in lover (Gabrielle Rose)– with whom we must Van has also had an intimate relationship– and she ritually performs on him the verbal directives from the telephone while Stan sex-chats. That phone sex operator is Aline, the beautiful Arsinee Khanjian, and her mother just happens to inhabit the bed beside Van’s grandmother at the nursing home. I don’t mean to belabor the plot, except to point out how contained and incestuous it is. Egoyan shoots the interior ‘family viewings’ of Van’s home in drab 2nd generation video (Egoyan is heady enough to aspire to comment on the ‘generations’ of the very technology he utilizes) so that it looks and plays exactly like a soulless soap opera. When the material is sharp (and it often is), it can be funny. The film, which balances this tone so nicely with the sharper ‘reality’ of 16mm in its other movements, does finally fall subject to Egoyan’s overbearing preoccupation with his own themes. He seems to try to make of them a very urgent mélange in the film’s final section, like a kind of arthouse thriller that treats small human dramas like matters of life and death. Even if it is intentionally overblown, it doesn’t entirely work– or at the very least doesn’t appropriately build on the delicately handled emotional curiosities of the film’s first two thirds. (w: Atom Egoyan, c: Robert MacDonald & Peter Mettler)
It’s no wonder that Speaking Parts (1989) comes off as pretentious. Its surrealism is so mannered and muted, and remains that way until the picture finally becomes loud and gratuitous. The shift of tone is too much. But Atom Egoyan has, in his third feature, become an evocative visual director, and his pictures seem to be tirelessly considered in all stages of development and construction so that they exude a certain curious intelligence. At this point in his career, Egoyan is still only 29 years old. Critics of the picture might mention that 1989 is the year Steven Soderbergh (merely 26 himself) flustered the establishment with Sex, Lies, and Videotape and flew home from France with a Palmes D’Or. Speaking Parts wilts in comparison, perhaps because Egoyan finally smothers out the uncanny in his movie. Though often exhibiting a certain immaturity, Sex, Lies and Videotape climaxes in a sequence that just soars with erotic energy. Though Egoyan’s entire body of work to 1989 could easily have been titled Sex, Lies and Videotape, he hasn’t approached anything close to Soderbergh’s climax. In Speaking Parts, he has at the very least created his most sympathetic creation in the lonely, forlorn Lisa, played by Arsinee Khanjian, displaying yet again her evocative combination of Isabella Rossellini-esque eroticism and softness. She’s infatuated with an aspiring actor named Lance whose job as a hotel housekeeper is a front for his work as a gigolo. He grows involved with a young screenwriter (Gabrielle Rose) who has written a deeply personal work on the memory of her own brother, who donated his lung to save her life. The plot is again an unusual configuration of elements. Egoyan works in reverse– he presents elaborately unlikely scenarios as commonplace, photographs them in a fairly measured, disciplined manner, and only slowly acknowledges the expressive possibilities of such arrangements. The composer, Mychael Danna, paces things with a minimalist score that sounds like John Carpenter by way of Philip Glass. No one touches in this erotic picture– even their kisses suspend mid air. Instead, they try to feel each other through screens, . Most of the film works wonderfully. So often, the emotional impact of a scene is clear and potent and only after do the more cerebral implications follow. Egoyan is sometimes compared to Cronenberg and that comparison is fair only if you mean the two are both Canadian and tend toward an infatuation with visual media. They end there– Cronenberg bullies his work into shape while Egoyan massages it. Even still, the delicate way the film unfolds is finally smothered in an overblown climax and the whole film so quickly unravels. It plays like bad Lynch and it works to undo a great deal of the pictures impact. But with each film, Egoyan becomes more and more interesting. (w: Atom Egoyan, c: Paul Sarossy
“You know, I never know whether or not to wake you in the middle of a nightmare.” This line is delivered early in Egoyan’s fourth film, The Adjuster (1991). This indescribably strange, evocative, erotic and disturbing film unfolds at first as mysteries of the mundane, much like, say, the late Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, or Fernando Pessoa before him. From its opening moments many things aren’t quite right. Its credits play over a human hand, glowing red, as if lit underneath by embers. The glow turns out to be a mere flashlight, and this sense of heat and menace in the fabric of the ordinary is the tone of the picture. If you look closely, this bright, bloody red appears somewhere in nearly every frame of the film, like the lick of a flame. Elias Koteas– at times seeming to channel energies from Travis Bickle– plays Noah, an insurance adjuster who uses a shabby motel as an Ark for his clients, and who cares far too intimately for them. Their homes have burned down. He arrives on the scene shortly after the firefighters, lit in a gauzy amber by cinematographer Paul Sarossy. “You may not feel it,” he tells them, “but you are in a state of shock.” The land and its people seem purgatorial. The film’s characters speak in an approximated diction, in oblique angles, like they are just skirting around the edges of saying something meaningful but where the words cannot be found. His wife, Hera, is a censor, secretly videotaping the pornographic material she is tasked to suppress. Her work, at first, appears enervating and strange. “We’re here to classify. Censorship is not a priority,” her boss explains. She gives the videos to her sister, who never speaks as she views the violent pornographic material– we can hardly tell if it is sex or murder– in the living room. Maury Chaykin is Bubba, a manufacturer of increasingly perverse play-acting scenarios for his depraved and deranged wife, Mimi. Mimi appears as an insatiable deviant without any identifiable occupation, and he as someone just on the edges of sanity. There are Lynchian combinations in film’s collisions of low culture and high menace, like in a sequence where Bubba hires the local football team to playact a bit of adolescent perversion to the song “High School Confidential” by the band Rough Trade. Noah and Hera live in an unfinished housing development, surrounded by barren land. There doesn’t even appear to be a road that runs to it. To amuse himself, Noah shoots arrows out of the window, or at a large billboard for the development that seems to portray a likeness of his own family. Hera returns home from work and they talk to each other obliquely. He tells her he spends his days “deciding what has value and what doesn’t.” “I know what you mean,” she replies, “it’s the same thing I do.” Over composer Mychael Danna’s low bass pulse is something close to Angelo Badalamenti’s woozy synths, and Indian flourishes that sing of the kind of mysteries that pervade the film. Noah does his work to aid his bereft clients, but in a way where both he and them seem victims of a collective Stockholm Syndrome. They are so thankful that they ingratiate him to the extent of meaninglessness, and seem to consider it generous that he sleeps with nearly all of them, seemingly every night. Even the prayer cards left on the motel pillows are dedicated to his generosity. Bubba contracts with Noah and Hera to use their home for the last of Mimi’s degenerate plays. This scene and those that follow between them are extraordinary for their tone. Chaykin, a brilliant and underused actor, is so unnerving, so discomfiting in his dissipated politeness, that as a creation of a movie he exudes an energy I may have never seen before. Without him, I suspect the movie would not work at all. Egoyan has a magnificent control of the medium, and his brilliantly unfolding narrative puzzles exude a similar energy long after the film has ended. Yet the picture occasionally feels more cerebral than would seem likely, given its strangeness. Chaykin cuts through that, and his final lunatic grimace almost seems traitorous, like a departing Satan grown exhausted of hell. (w: Atom Egoyan; c: Paul Sarossy)
The slowly reconstructed puzzle Exotica (1994) is an atlas of empathy. It best exemplifies Egoyan’s project to exhibit unusual human behavior in the barest of ways and to slowly reveal the reasons and connections that approach an explanation for it. This kind of behavior the film puts forth as exhibitions of “tension,” where knowledge of the “baggage”– the factual accumulation of experience and pain that would cause it– is not known by the observer. The kind of human behavior that is not readily understood– that, to greater or lesser degrees, unnerves people. It goes some way toward insinuating that the accumulated experience (and trauma) of life eventuates for all of us in at least idiosyncrasy, and often, yet worse, a kind of derangement. It suggests that empathy is not only a virtue, but a currency, and that even social deviancy is not so easily divined. How the film accomplishes this can only be sustained in the cinema. Is the film schematic? Very much so. It would read like an essay (and does here) if it were not so artfully done. I suppose I don’t need to say that it is a remarkable film. Bruce Greenwood stars as Francis Brown, a bereft Tax auditor for Canada’s revenue department. How he is bereft is something the film slowly unfolds. By day, he analyzes financial documents, like he is doing at an exotic pet shop run by Thomas (Don McKellar). By night he attends the strip club, “Exotica.” It’s a place men go to fill some deeper need than just sex. It is owned by Zoe (Arsinee Khanjian), who inherited the spot from her mother. There’s a corridor installed that has two way mirrors so that she can watch her unusual patrons act like strange animals and the sounds of exotic birds are always playing in the background. She has very strict rules about touching. So it is both classier and far more disturbing than your average joint. There is a dancer there named Christina. She dons a schoolgirl outfit and dances– shimmies, more like– a strangely choreographed concoction of sexual taunting, sign language, and pantomime. It’s even more disturbing for looking at times like a dance a child would dream up. She does this for the audience, but it seems mostly for Francis, whom she joins nightly at his table for a private dance. She dances with her shirt only just open, like the law would forbid her to remove it. Eventually, Francis– who, until it happens, seems like a loosely held together depressive– asks Christina in tearful incredulity, “why would anyone hurt you?” It’s the question of a crazy person, at the limits of sanity, but it doesn’t seem to bother her– she makes it part of her act. He runs off to the bathroom, where he doesn’t masturbate, like this charged material might normally suggest, but rather pulls himself together and leaves. He does this every night. There are recurring dialogues he shares with Sarah Polley, who plays Tracey, that are brilliant in their probing implications and emotional maturity. Greenwood gives a performance of remarkably balanced constraint with material that forces him into precarious emotional positions. Polley, only 15 at filming, has remarkable command. In a way, their talks serve as the heart of the film. She’s growing tired of this charade she’s participating in: Every day Francis picks her up to babysit his daughter. But there is no daughter and no wife. There’s only a grand piano, which affords her father, who approves of this arrangement, the excuse that she is “practicing”. Why is she doing this? It’s both her question and ours. Why does her father approve of this? Why, similarly, does Christina allow herself to be peddled as “jailbait” by her ex (Elias Koteas), who, as DJ of the club, ruminates on the erotic mysteries of schoolgirls for the patrons? Why does she continue to dance for Francis though he seems so unhinged? There is, enchantingly, as you might tell, a mystery at the heart of Exotica that Egoyan goes a great distance to explain but finally cannot fully account for. It’s imbued into the aesthetic of the film, in Mychael Danna’s score, for example, which juxtaposes western piano with an Indian shenhai– two things that seemingly should not go together, but do. These characters, their circumstances, and their pain lean against each other for support, in ways they will never fully understand, and because of this in ways that will never be fully disentangled. It’s not simply that they depend on each other, and selflessly support one another in their own oblique ways. It suggests there is a deeper, more mysterious symbiosis hidden in even the benign mechanics of life that are never resolved. Reasons can be crudely given, but the full contours cannot be known. Because these truths evade full comprehension, the film then moves beyond empathy and into an expression of sympathy rarely so fully articulated. One that is a thousand miles away from the kind of exploitation the dynamics would suggest. Unlike The Adjuster, Exotica does tie these loose ends together. Not with a bow, but with an insinuation that is more powerful for not being fully explained. I’m not sure which of these two remarkable films is the better. It doesn’t matter. Neither is remotely flawless, but they are both so vibrant they live with you long after the credits end. (w: Atom Egoyan, c: Paul Sarossy)
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