Felicia’s Journey
Atom Egoyan, UK/Canada, 1999, 116 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
Dirty, filth whore to her father, fucked and forgotten by Johnny, Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) crosses the Irish Sea pregnant and desperate. The ‘boyfriend’ promised an address, his mother won’t tell, and all he told Felicia was a lawnmower factory in England’s second city. So here she is, badly dressed, lolloping through Brum’s endless industrial estates in unsuitable shoes, asking, "Is this where they make lawnmowers?" Her father, he knew the dirty, filthy bastard went and joined the Army.
So that’s how the naive and maddenly optimistic Felicia meets Hilditch (Bob Hoskins). His little green car, button-down suits, button-down bachelorhood. His home is preserved in aspic, a shrine to his late TV chef mother, Gala (Arsinée Khanjian). He’s happiest in his kitchen, cooking along to her old shows. And murdering young women.
Not that we see anyone die at his hand. But we are privy - in the film’s second major innovation over William Trevor’s novel (the first being Gala) - to videotapes secretly recorded in his car. Cultivating fatherly concern. And now here’s young Felicia, miles from home, alone and vulnerable. He’ll help her look for Johnny.
Felicia’s Journey is arguably Atom Egoyan at his most superficial. Certainly, Khanjian (Mrs Egoyan) is redundant. The film fills out Hilditch far more than Trevor; it’s as specific about his world as it is vague on his motives. The result is less surreal, more Hitchcock, with Egoyan even restaging the staircase scene from 1941’s Suspicion. And what about Hilditch and his mother? Another Norman Bates? A debt is acknowledged.
No, if the film is superficial, then it’s because it’s here just to tell a story - sedate, sombre, deliberately paced - end to end. Backgrounds are fleshed in with Egoyan’s familiar intricate flashbacks, but at no point does Felicia’s Journey offer a conundrum on a par with Speaking Parts or his masterpiece, The Adjuster. Which does, I suppose, also make it his most accessible - and no doubt financially rewarding - work.
(That said, there are suggestions that maybe Hilditch’s world is not all it seems. Certainly the incidental details of his job in catering management seem perverse in their authority. And the final, apparently benign shot, is deeply unsettling.)
The chief innovation is in seeing this Canadian writer-director shooting here for the first time. And drawn, no less, to our drabbest city and its environs. Maybe the greying concrete and monumental cooling towers work the same magic on Transatlantic audiences as Canuck suburbias and snowscapes do on us. He and regular cinematographer Paul Sarossy almost make Birmingham attractive: England through an outsider’s eye like Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired A Contract Killer.
Performances are flawless, with Elaine Cassidy remarkable as the almost innocent Felicia. You want to grab a hold and shake some sense into her. And Hoskins hasn’t been this good since his 70s heyday (Pennies From Heaven, The Long Good Friday). The accent is insinuating, the sly calculation insidious. It is as hard to buy Hilditch’s act as it is to believe him capable of anything more than he benignly suggests. There is black comedy at work, albeit of such a queasy, uneasy kind that it’s hard not to want a bath after spending time in his company.
And there you go, you see? For my money, Atom Egoyan is, currently, the world’s most talented film-maker. Anything less than greatness will not suffice. And yet, after spending the time it’s taken to write this, thinking back on his disturbing little film, I’ve argued myself into craving an immediate return visit. Take that as my own personal recommendation.