"In A
World Of Temptation, Obsession Is The Deadliest Desire" —tagline, Exotica
To
this day, I'm convinced that neither Harvey Weinstein nor his marketing
underlings at Miramax ever saw Atom Egoyan's 1995 film Exotica; either that, or they were so
flummoxed over how to promote it that they decided to pretend like they had
bought another movie. How else to explain the tagline, which doesn't even make
sense on the face of it, let alone describe the movie adequately. "Obsession"
is the only word that applies, but it's neither deadly nor a desire, and the
world of Exotica,
though centered largely on a strip club, has nothing to do with temptation,
since its characters have more pressing things on their minds than merely getting
off. Then there's the poster, with a shot of a stripper writhing under the
spotlight and a pair of menacing eyes looking out from a dark background like a
Dario Argento movie. It's painful to imagine all the viewers duped into
believing they were getting an erotic thriller, then stumbling into dense,
cerebral puzzle picture about voyeurism, memory, and loss. And it's even more
painful to think of the many people who might have loved Exotica if they knew it wasn't the
dumb straight-to-video softcore movie they perceived it to be.
To
cut Miramax some slack for their bait-and-switch, Exotica was never going to be an easy
sell, because to describe it in more than the vaguest terms would be to give
the game away. (And for those who haven't seen it, please take that as your cue
to skedaddle.) Egoyan's delicate conceit gives us five or so major characters,
but doesn't spell out anything right away about who they are or how they might
be connected. All he shows is their behavior and the often curious ways they
interact, deliberately misleading the audience into assuming things that don't
turn out to be true. In a way, the flagrantly deceptive marketing campaign
could be said to serve Egoyan's film, after all: Believing Exotica is a sexy thriller set in a
world of temptation, where obsession is the deadliest desire, isn't the worst
place for an open-minded person to start. Just be prepared to have the rug
pulled out from under you.
Though Exotica
was probably Egoyan's breakthrough to American arthouse audiences—and if
they missed it, 1997's equally superb and more overtly devastating The Sweet
Hereafter was
not far behind—he had already established himself as a perceptive
chronicler of life in the Communication Age. As an undergrad, there wasn't a
film that I championed more vigorously than Egoyan's 1989 gem Speaking Parts, which spoke to a generation
raised on home video and their capacity to construct fictions—and even
have relationships—with images. In Speaking Parts, for example, one character
obsesses over a movie extra and repeatedly rents videos in which he appears in
the background (hence the ironic title); and another tries to honor her
deceased brother by writing a screenplay about him, only to watch it get
compromised so thoroughly that her memories of him are corroded. In Egoyan's
films, there's an invisible force field that separates one character from
another, making them all voyeurs, watching and fantasizing without really
interacting. When that force field is broken, it's a powerful moment, because
it snaps them back to a reality that's been too painful for them to accept.
Exotica tends to draw
love-it-or-hate-it reactions from people, and I suspect that may have something
to do with the fact that Egoyan never puts viewers on terra firma. Instead, he casts them
adrift in a mystery that's not a whodunit, but a whoarethey, and very slowly
peels back the layers until they know how these characters connect and why they
behave the way they do. At times, he deliberately leads us down the wrong path:
Early on, Bruce Greenwood drops off a very young Sarah Polley at her apartment
and hands her a wad of bills peeled from his wallet. What's he paying her for?
A couple scenes before, we saw him pay for a private dance from a stripper with
a schoolgirl image, so it doesn't take much to formulate a shady equation. That
equation, however, would be completely wrong.
The
title refers to perhaps the most anti-erotic club since the post-apocalyptic
XXX cult item Café Flesh, in which so-called "Sex Negatives" (the 99% of the population
that can't copulate) crowd into clubs to watch "Sex Positives" get it on. At
Exotica, the fake palms and Middle Eastern grooves create a thick atmosphere
that's immediately scotched by the running commentary from DJ Elias Koteas ("Bring
those big, hairy palms together, gentleman…") and a stripper, played by Mia
Kirshner, who performs a schoolgirl routine to Leonard Cohen's "Everybody
Knows." Every other night, Kirshner sidles up to Greenwood, a haunted gentleman
who comes only to see her, and the two have a relationship that's clearly
beyond professional. In fact, Kirshner's hips sway just enough to keep management
at bay; what she does for Greenwood is more personal and intimate than getting
him hot and bothered. As we find out later, it's an unusual kind of therapy,
though that's doesn't keep Koteas, who has a different obsession with Kirshner,
from wanting to break it up. Here's Kirshner, "a sassy bit of jailbait," work
her NSFW magic:
Meanwhile,
Egoyan follows the seemingly inconsequential adventures of Don McKellar, a gay
pet store proprietor who's first seen smuggling exotic bird eggs through
customs. On his way back from the airport, he splits a cab ride with a
businessman who stiffs him on the money, but gives him a pair of ballet tickets
to scalp. Instead, McKellar finds an attractive man, offers him a ticket, and
spends much of the show casting furtive glances toward his lap; night after
night, he repeats the same pattern with a different man, pretending that he was
given an extra ticket while fishing for someone to love. Back at the store,
McKellar is visited by Greenwood, who pretends he's an auditor when he's really
a government agent—a fact that Greenwood uses to leverage McKellar into
doing him a big favor.
Beyond
the tragic center of Greenwood's life—an incident that's elegantly
revealed over a series of flashbacks—it's role-playing and routine that
unites the characters. Greenwood can be counted on to visit the same club every
other night, and arrange for exclusive lapdances from Kirshner, who obliges him
in the same way after the same onstage ritual to Leonard Cohen. While he's
away, Greenwood pays Polley to baby-sit at his childless house, which she does
as a kindness, using the opportunity to catch up on her music lessons. For
Polley and Kirshner both, allowing Greenwood to perpetuate the fantasy that his
life hasn't been destroyed requires them to play roles they know are false,
even dangerous, but help sustain his fragile psyche through unimaginable pain.
McKellar, too, makes a habit of going to the ballet every night, quietly
searching for company to relieve his loneliness and perhaps an impending sense
of legal doom.
In
the club, Egoyan finds the perfect setting for his ongoing concerns about the
way people interact in the modern world. Voyeurism has been a pet theme for
Egoyan from the beginning, in video-heavy films like Family Viewing and Speaking Parts, which are all about our
complex relationship with images and the way they can supplant memory or real
interaction. (There's only a tiny snippet of video footage in Exotica, but in true Egoyan fashion,
it proves pivotal in the closing minutes.) The club is full of one-way mirrors,
which were ostensibly installed to protect the dancers, but are used more often
for the edification of those who like to watch without being seen. But more
than anything, the cardinal rule of conduct—look, but don't
touch—applies to every key relationship in the film, and breaking the
rule requires an act of courage that can have serious consequences.
If Exotica sounds like a miserable
dirge, it certainly doesn't play like one. Egoyan may not be interested in
making a strip club seductive in a conventional way, but he knows how to tease
you through a complicated thicket of hidden motivations, eccentric behavior,
and layered achronology. (Hats off to Egoyan's cameraman Paul Sarossy for his
moody lighting scheme and to composer Mychael Danna, whose sinuous non-Western
score evokes the title more effectively than the club itself.) Mysteries almost
always begin with an incident and then introduce the audience to various
suspects and red herrings to keep them off the scent. Exotica completely reverses the
formula: It buries the incident and leaves us unmoored, wondering what its
characters are doing and what secret connections bind them together. And once
all the puzzle pieces are finally in place, Egoyan has laid out a human
mystery, and a devastating one at that.
Coming
Up:
Next
week: Reservoir Dogs
Dec.
25: Hiatus (Christmas)
Jan.
1: Hiatus 2: The Quickening (New Year's Day)
Jan.
8: Married To The Mob