[3.9]
Another frustrating movie by Atom Egoyan. It’s so close to being amazing, but can’t quite pull it off. Like EXOTICA, there are beautifully unnerving and skilled camera glides, a solid soundtrack, offbeat editing that mingles past and present, and the eerie presence of old, home-made video footage. Egoyan manages to evoke a mood, a feeling of lingering loss, imbued with an underlying sense of dread. And then, he breaks it. When Joe Hilditch’s mother Gala first shows up, in flickering black-and-white on a small television, leading a cooking presentation, we assume this is all we will see of her. But later, when Joe’s kitchen mixer breaks, he throws it in the trash and goes into another room, which (in an actually hilarious gag) is loaded with boxes of Gala’s signature mixer. It’s a great moment, because it is weird and funny and disquieting (what kind of disturbed man keeps a room full of decades-old leftover products?), but we also learn a lot about the character in that brief glimpse (he clearly has some obsessive interest in Gala). Unfortunately, Gala keeps showing up, mostly in extended flashbacks of Joe’s memory. You see, she’s his overbearing mother. Overly loving, but also suffocating in her largeness. Egoyan casts his wife, Arsinée Khanjian, as Gala, and it’s a disaster. In EXOTICA, Khanjian is used in a similarly campy way, but in the oddness of the club setting, it somehow works. Here, her flamboyantly cliché French accent seems like a joke at first. We almost expect a flashback in which she drops it and speaks in her natural Cockney accent or something. But no, Gala is never shown as anything but sincere. And everytime she showed up, it was cloying, grating, and did not mesh at all with the nuanced performances of Bob Hoskins (as Joe) or Elaine Cassidy (as Felicia). I suppose an argument could be made that her exaggerated performance is a result of Joe’s memory of her, her qualities accentuated to almost the point of parody. Or, Occam’s razor: Khanjian is just a bad actress.
Performance aside, the flashbacks are also just a bit too on-the-nose. We don’t need to see Joe’s mom force-feeding him liver until he gags, or to see her ignoring her son for the sake of her career. Enough of that is inferred from the impeccable production design (the amazing opening tracking shot– that floats from room to room of Joe’s home, nearly untouched from childhood, filled with board games and war memorabilia and old lamps and plenty of photos of mother– tells us a lot about the character from the get-go), so that there’s little point to these long home-movie-style flashbacks to spell out the feelings that were already so beautifully hanging in the air. The only time it feels especially warranted is when Joe steals Felicia’s money (hoping to secure her dependence on him), and we flashback to Joe in his garden, ignored by mother, and he finds a wallet in the dirt. He picks it up, pockets the money, and then buries the wallet. I loved the symmetry of the action, as it also seems to suggest his first “crime”, the primal chink in his innocence. The video flashbacks, from hidden-cam footage Joe shot in his car of his conversations with women (typically prostitutes) before murdering them, is effective as exposition and repetition. We learn the history of his crimes, though the images are vague as to what he actually does to them. For a while, I assumed maybe Egoyan was playing with us. Maybe Joe is just an obsessive conversationalist. When the women finally protest, maybe he fights with them, but lets them go. Maybe it’s our own prejudices that make us assume his lonely, mother-obsessed personality means he must be a murderer. But then in the final scenes, Joe admits he killed them all because he was lonely, and that he couldn’t kill Felicia until she got an abortion, because he wouldn’t be responsible for also killing a baby. Why bother with this drawn-out confession? Why go to such pains to create an elliptical, atmospheric character piece and then trash it with unnecessarily leaden monologuing?
Egoyan is certainly talented, and many of his decisions are artfully planned-out. His always-roaming camera breathes otherworldly life into the images, and his decision on when and how to insert the flashbacks has a dream-logic. The editing follows a sort of old-fashioned structure: woman sees man, close up of woman’s face, reverse shot of the same man but now he is someone else from her memories, back to the woman’s reaction. But here, the inferred connection of scenes isn’t always clear. One great use of sound is when Kate Bush’ “Sensual World” plays in the bar where Felicia and Johnny first have their date. It’s purely diegetic music, and when we cut out of this scene, the music stops. But when we go back to this scene, the song continues in the background, as we would expect. But then we cut to an overhead tracking shot of Felicia walking through this foreign British city, and the song continues, having moved from memory to present-day soundtrack. It’s a subtle effect, but works well. Some other moments also stand out: when Joe is killing time in the hospital, pretending to wait for his wife who doesn’t exist, he sees the movie SALOME playing on TV. The actress screams, “bring me the head of John the Baptist!”, and later, religion will play a strange role when two evangelists wander into Joe’s backyard and urge him to accept salvation. The religious elements offer an interesting texture to the movie, but never quite gels. And when Joe brings a plate of cookies and poisoned tea up to Felicia (shades of Hitchcock’s SUSPICION for sure), Joe stops at the top of that stairs and stares at the camera directly for three beats, then continues. What was this breaking of the fourth wall about?
When the film seems to end with Joe’s home movie memories flickering out, the screen jumps back from black for an unnecessary epilogue in which we learn that Felicia is moving on with her life, and we see her helping people. The camera continues to roam through a garden and up to the sky. What is this finale supposed to mean? Egoyan shows such mastery of the form for much of the movie, but he lets us down with his poor nepotistic casting and penchant for explaining the obvious while letting other moments flit by without connecting them to his other ideas.
burning retina 