[In the following review, Testa argues that the published script of Speaking Parts fails to support Egoyan's reputation as a leading postmodern director.]

The publication of scripts of English-Canadian films is regrettably a rarity. Coach House's Speaking Parts, the script of Canadian film director Atom Egoyan's 1989 film, is a model of how a script should be presented. In addition to the script, there is an introductory essay by Professor Ron Burnett of McGill University, an interview with the director conducted by film critic Marc Glassman, a short piece by the director, and a well-prepared filmography.

The appearance of the book raises several issues. The first is the necessity of its elaboration, which is a bit saddening. Since his mid-twenties, Egoyan, now thirty-three, has frequently been declared to be the leading English-Canadian director of his generation. However, no critic has come forward with a cogent account of why he is to be so highly regarded. The writing on Egoyan is little more than press publicity and, for a director of his notable intellectual and artistic ambition, this must be a disappointment. For those of us less impressed by the idea of Atom Egoyan projected by the press—and who have never been able to see that idea realized on the screen—the postponement of some substantiation of all the claims made for him seems inexplicably long. His films, and Speaking Parts especially, have become classroom fixtures and Egoyan has become today's object of Canadian film culture's desire for an ‘art cinema’ hero. The least question (though it is also a most polysemous question) we doubters might like to have answered is ‘What does Atom Egoyan mean?’

In this respect, appreciation of this volume must be limited to the merely ceremonial. Egoyan's interview with Glassman and Burnett's introductory essay are no help in answering our question. The interview strays away from Speaking Parts into comfortable chatter around the director's familiar media persona. Burnett's article is a little fatuous, the sort of thing academic critics can be depended upon to click on when they are unsure what to say and are grasping for ready-made assertions of aesthetic importance. Today, these are themes of disassociated subjectivity and narrative disjunctiveness. Here are some of Burnett's thesis paragraphs:

Egoyan is concerned with the relationship between image and identity: his film proposes that images have transformed the personal and public spaces between his characters. It suggests that there is no point of separation between image and identity, no ‘ground zero’ (as Jean-Luc Godard once called it) where reality and image can be posited as different from each other. As the opening shots of the film reveal, there seems to be a point of departure and no end point where this proliferation of images can be explained with the kind of depth for which Egoyan is searching. In other words, although the film seeks to explore how its characters grapple with the past, history is absent. …

This sense of fragmentation, bounded by questions of truth and morality, drives the narrative of the film forward. Although Egoyan remains faithful to the idea that a story must be told, he questions conventional strategies of storytelling through a dispersal of image and narrative.

The problem with such thematic claims is that Speaking Parts does not speak to them. In the film itself ‘history’ is uncovered. The source of the guilt that troubles the female protagonist, Clara, while enigmatic in ‘the opening shots,’ is revealed to be her past and it is dramatically exhausted by the last scene. Moreover, ‘history’ is re-presented throughout, for Clara has written it in the form of a television script. The male protagonist, Lance, has read it and grasped it, and it bears the mark of truth for both of them and for the viewer. Clara's true history is betrayed by the villain, the sinister TV producer, and that betrayal confirms its representation by making such an issue of deforming it. Similarly, image and identity are constantly asserted to be different in this film, and the script ensures that the drama of Clara's betrayal hinges on it. Visually, too, Egoyan's rhetoric sharply juxtaposes lower-fidelity video footage with film footage to express this difference.

Even a child, then, could recognize what Clara and Lance recognize, that truth has been written and is being bowdlerized. The confused one is Lisa, the somnambulistic hotel chambermaid in love with Lance. Lisa reveals that she has less savvy than a child and, as played by Arsinée Khanjian (Egoyan's wife and favourite actress) with her patented dazed naïvety, Lisa serves in an idiotic capacity as the slight, ambiguating pressure in Speaking Parts. But the accent should definitely fall on slight. As for ‘fragmentation’ and ‘dispersal’ of images, nowhere does Burnett, or the printed script, tell us why Speaking Parts seems so narratively fragmented. The reason is simple: Egoyan has broken up his plotting's straightforward linearity (Burnett's ‘a story must be told’) through a formal convolution. Stripped of normal transitional markers of ellipsis or simultaneity, or punctuating counterpoints, the film's editing is often arbitrary. The connections between narrative segments (written simply as numbered scenes in the script) seem to have been composed by a sleep-walker, hence the sense of disassociation. Nonetheless, before long, the viewer does catch on to the dramatic fact that the disassociative editing pattern is merely decorative.

Burnett elsewhere opens a door to what Egoyan's mannered decoration of Speaking Parts means. The TV set in the mausoleum where Clara conducts her seances probably does, for example, signify incest aping sacrality, as Burnett suggests. But the film's structure is anything but a denial of history, memory, or identity. If anything, Egoyan's films are about the maddening attachment to these things. From the start of his filmmaking, at least since Open House (1982) and Next of Kin (1984), he has gone on (and on) about how sentimentally wrenching the discovery of memory and identity within the family can be. Clara possesses them already and it is their enactment—through ‘art’ (a TV movie!)—that promises her some confessional release from her private guilt.

However, all this hardly validates Burnett's ‘transformation’ of public and private. This cannot be exactly what ‘concerns’ Egoyan, for it is a frustrated will to enact such a transformation that grips Clara and drives the plot. Either the director conceives this transformation to be impossible, or he is as foolish as Clara is. In any case, Egoyan denies her the chance to turn her personal history into a speaking part. This is his own wise refusal to allow her to seem foolish, or, one suspects, to seem foolish himself. Expressed simply through plot machinations that contrive to steal Clara's memories and history (actually she sells them), his narrative refusal to test the hypothesis of such transformation permits Egoyan to sustain Clara's slight pathos, and even to moralize it when she becomes the woman betrayed.

Just as he does with Lisa's role and the mannered editing of his film, Egoyan's plotting, then, deliberately veils what he intends and leaves us asking what he means altogether. Whatever the director might have intended, common sense suggests that the obvious significance Speaking Parts implies is woefully sentimental, an obviousness Egoyan only complicates with melodramatic betrayals. Moreover, it should be understood, these complications derive from nothing mysterious or theoretical, which is what Burnett's facile essay wants anxiously to claim for Speaking Parts. Indeed, much about the film's plotting suggests ways Atom Egoyan continues to reveal himself still to be a somewhat classical man of the theatre (his field of study while a student at University of Toronto) more than he is the postmodern Canadian art-cinema filmmaker proclaimed in the press and in some classrooms.