Exotica
With each of their latest films there are striking parallels to be drawn between the American Hal Hartley and Canada’s Atom Egoyan. Obviously both are writer-directors, each with a distinctive and immediately recognisable style. But more than that, Hartley with Amateur and Egoyan with this, the marvellous Exotica, have entered new phases of their respective careers, each electing to become at once accessible to a wider public through investment in a (nominal) thriller device, but at the same time retaining the idiosyncratic edge, rich style and apparently discursive language that has endeared them to their more fastidious cult audiences. In that sense, both Hartley and Egoyan are real auteurs.
Exotica itself is a strip-club where for $5 women table-dance for an exclusively male clientele. It is frequented by Francis (the wonderfully dour Bruce Greenwood), a tax auditor with a fascination for Christina (Mia Kirschner) whose act involves dressing as a schoolgirl and provocatively performing to Leonard Cohen’s singularly sour ‘Everybody Knows’.
Away from the club we meet the anxious Thomas (Don McKellar), gay owner of an exotic but rather dingy pet store. Thomas is a smuggler of rare bird eggs and under investigation by Francis. And every so often the film cuts to flashback as Kirschner and Exotica’s MC/DJ Eric (Elias Koteas) join a group searching rolling, verdant hills for a missing child. (A sequence which works less well on Exotica’s video release than on film.)
Shorn of its elliptical elegance and ingenious juxtapositions of language and image, Exotica betrays none of the brilliance of its conception. In the same way that Hartley’s film shields behind facile talk of conspiracy, so Egoyan’s equally masks its purpose in more obvious camouflage. His work (this is the sixth feature for the remarkable 35-year-old in just over a decade) has always been about the nature of seeing, the objectification of people, the transformation of self-image. Whereas before he used film and - in particular - video, in this film Egoyan’s methods are ever more intricate, examining these characters through mirrors that are also windows (a customs office; the walls of the club) and professional uniforms. Most obviously there is Kirschner’s jailbait costume, but also the multifarious disguises assumed by the club’s owner, the pregnant Zoe (Arsineee Khanjian, the director’s genuinely pregnant actress wife).
Much of the cast will be familiar to Egoyan watchers. The majority appeared in his last feature, the brilliant The Adjuster (1991), and all are exceptional. McKellar (who co-wrote last year’s intriguing, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould) and Koteas (so good as The Adjuster) never allow you to get a firm grip and thus remain fascinating and enigmatic throughout, while Kirschner is spellbinding in a difficult, thankless role; watch the telling synthesis of Cohen’s words and her frighteningly detached performance.
Given the bulk of this film takes place in a strip club (exotic albeit with an aura of artificial sophistication), Egoyan’s images are never prurient and remain defiantly unerotic: the film is not about what we see but what people are trying to hide. Mychael Danna’s cross-cultural score and Paul Sarossy’s elegant camerawork (the director cannot resist one trademark video interlude) offer an easy and, at the same time, troubling way into this puzzle about desire, eroticism and exploitation, but once inside a web of grief and emotion takes over that Egoyan only resolves in the final moments with satisfying completeness. His (partially accidental) final shot is astounding.
Exotica brought the Canadian the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes last year and looks set to bring his unique, austere, terrifyingly emotional meditations to a far wider audience than ever before. If he can do that without sacrificing his essential, unpredictable genius then Egoyan looks set to become one of contemporary cinema’s brightest hopes.