SOURCE: “Exploitations,” in Sight & Sound, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1995, pp. 6–8.

[In the following review, Romney offers a negative assessment of Exotica, criticizing Egoyan's style of filmmaking as unfulfilling.]

Atom Egoyan makes bitterly disappointing films. They begin by stirring our curiosity—our desire to play detective or analyst, or simply our prurient longing for a glimpse of the louche, the exotic. And when finally they deliver what we're looking for, they invariably frustrate us—all we discover is that revelation can never be satisfactory. We learn that there are always more layers to the onion, or that it was never really an onion in the first place. As Egoyan's new film Exotica makes explicit, this director's work resembles the consummate art of male frustration that is striptease—we await the moment of laying bare only to have it dawn on us that the body is the one thing we don't want to see (just yet). His films are structured to exemplify a full-blown erotics of cinema, with all the attendant play of sadism and masochism. In that sense, his is the most profoundly anti-erotic cinema imaginable.

Egoyan's first feature Next of Kin (1984) began with the image of an unidentified bag going round on an airport carousel. It immediately poses the key questions that underlie his films. Whose baggage is this? Where's it from? What do we find if we unpack it? Exotica revisits this image. Its first words, spoken by one customs official to his junior as they scan a suspected smuggler, are: “You have to ask yourself—what brought the person to this point? You have to convince yourself that this person has something hidden that you have to find.” This is a pitch to our curiosity, too, and it's not that different from the come-on spiel that strip-club MC Eric (Elias Koteas) gives his customers as he invites them to pay ＄5 to have a stripper “reveal the mysteries of her world.”

But if we pay the price of admission, what guarantees satisfaction? At one point in the film, a younger Eric says he feels he wasn't ever meant to be satisfied. The woman he's talking to replies, “Maybe you want it to slip away—the thing you think you're about to have.” And consequently the film itself—a baroque construction of ellipses, flashbacks and repetitions—is angled to provide us with the constant anxiety/satisfaction of deferral.

His most complex essay in the Cinema of Disappointment, Egoyan's Exotica is built around the metaphors of striptease as psychological unmasking, narrative unpacking, commerce and contract. Layer after layer of meaning is revealed, although we're never quite sure whose “mysteries” we expect to discover (the film makes it remarkably difficult to identify a ‘central’ character). In the first 20 minutes, the threads come at us thick and fast. Thomas (Don McKellar), a nervous young pet shop owner who is smuggling goods, makes it through customs and shares a cab with a man who offers him ballet tickets instead of his share of the ride; Thomas will later use the tickets, at the ballet to procure himself a series of male sexual partners. He is meanwhile being audited by Francis (Bruce Greenwood), a tax official and a regular customer of the strip club Exotica, who is obsessed by Christina (Mia Kirshner), who performs, dressed as a schoolgirl. Exotica is presided over by proprietor Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian), who has made a contract with Eric to make her pregnant. Eric, also obsessed with Christina, presides over the club, spurring his customers to buy across-the-table intimacies with the dancers. The circle of avoidance and negotiation is complete when Francis, banned from his club, does a deal with Thomas—an outsider sexually, but also the outsider in terms of the narrative—and brings him into the world of Exotica as his substitute.

It's only at the end, in a downbeat and extremely simple flashback scene, that Egoyan gives us some sort of ‘explanation’ of what's on these people's minds, of what's making their lives unworkable. But it's no sort of conclusion—it only makes us want to go back to the beginning and start again. It's a structure Egoyan has used before—notably in The Adjuster (1991), whose final moment similarly explains nothing but rather, so to speak, incinerates what's gone before. (Egoyan films tend to come together or fall apart with real or figurative conflagrations).

In his Director's Statement, Egoyan accepts that Exotica is structured like a striptease; but points out that this was only his analysis after the event. “The film wasn't meant to support a theory,” he says, “it wasn't constructed that way. I do find it fascinating how the ending is very cathartic for some people, and other people find it wasn't what they expected or needed at that point. I liked the ending. All these relationships, where people's emotions are so carefully guarded and so tenuously exchanged … suddenly you can see that for all the pretence, everything is rooted in this very real relationship between Christina and Francis.”

The most film's controversial element is the way it plays with the suggestion of paedophilia, with Christina doing her act dressed in a schoolgirl's tartan skirt, white shirt and tie. Eric repeatedly teases his customers with the riddle, “What gives a schoolgirl her special innocence?” This disguises another question: what makes him, or Francis or us, want to invest in the mystique of innocence, and how does it become sexualised?

What Egoyan's also offering us is a tease which places the film in a particular art-movie niche: the erotic psychological thriller, one that French directors have been exploiting since time immemorial. Of course, there's a perilous borderline between alluding to exploitation. and exploitation period.

“There are two answers—one is what the film itself represents, the other is how it's marketed. I've been very demanding that the image of Christina dressed as a schoolgirl won't be used on any of the posters, because it's an image that only makes sense in the context of the film. It was an image I was very protective of, not in the sense of creating a mystification round it, but I was aware of how it could be abused.

“The film does play with that tension, there's no question about it. There is that use of titillation, sexual manipulation. Because when you get down to it, I don't think it's an erotic film at all. You begin by assuming the relationship between Francis and Christina is perverse, that he has a paedophilic attraction to her. When you realise what is actually going on. it's platonic in the truest sense. He's projecting onto her something that's extremely pure. Though that has its consequences as well.

The environment [of the club] is sexual, so that can't help but imbue what he's seeing in her with a sexual content. And that tortures him, as he's trying to work out some sort of therapeutic relationship with her. He's trying to heal some sense of grief—which becomes infused with guilt, because of where he's chosen to conduct this therapy.”

All Egoyan's films could be said to explore therapy in one way or another, with his characters elaborating byzantine rituals of repetition, and constantly displacing their obsessions onto other characters who may or may not fit them. In Next of Kin (1984), an isolated young man invents an alternative family for himself; in Speaking Parts (1989), a woman tries to ‘cast’ an actor as her dead brother; the hero of The Adjuster obsessively becomes involved with his clients, while his own household is invaded by a couple who live out their own fantasies as meticulously staged performance art. Therapy in Egoyan's films always goes too far, and is invariably compromised by the vehicles people choose for it, usually TV or video technology.

“There's a group of analysts in Toronto who have looked at all my films. They've told me that from their point of view, all my films deal with a process called ‘faulty mourning’—when a patient builds a ritual of mourning which only accentuates and exaggerates the sense of loss which they think they're dealing with.

“In all the films there seems to be someone who's in the process of grieving another person's loss. But in the process, they're somehow underlining and distorting what it is that they've lost in the first place. In all of them, people extend this sense of loss through the relationship with an image, and because technology has the ability to preserve a moment, that moment can become fetishised and live way beyond its anticipated life.

“In Exotica, I've taken away the insistence on technology—apart from one video moment—but it's replaced by the transposition of someone into an icon. Christina's uniform becomes what video technology was in the other films.”

Because the ubiquitous video eye for once recedes into the background, Exotica is harder than its predecessors simply to pigeonhole as an ‘Egoyan film’—his preoccupations and tropes have been so consistent that he's practically created his own genre. It may not, ultimately, be as tight-knit a film as The Adjuster, in which the hermetic anxiety genuinely admits of no relief. It could be argued that Exotica has too many thematic and narrative strands for its own good—although it's that very sense of unresolved over-abundance that makes it so suggestive and hard to exhaust. The one notion of exoticism that seems insufficiently assimilated into the film's argument is that which attaches to race; and that's partly because it centres on characters who are less central, or even absent. Francis' wife and daughter are black; another white character, Harold, lives with his daughter in a black neighbourhood almost parodically dangerous. There's a clear mirror image of Francis here; what's not so clear is how it dovetails with the rest—a problem Egoyan admits he hasn't entirely resolved.

“There are two ideas being explored in the film—that which is outside your cultural experience, and that which is outside your own way of perceiving your memory. At what point do our own experiences and feelings become exotic to us? At what point do we transpose people we're attracted to onto the level of metaphor? If I deal with that theme, I have to suggest it through what the viewer is also projecting. So you have Harold in a clearly black atmosphere wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt—he's someone who feels more comfortable in that cultural context but there is something askew about it. He's made a parody of himself.

“I want the film to provoke controversy, but what I find far more controversial than the image of a schoolgirl is the use of colour in the film—the fact that Francis' wife is black, that Harold lives in a black environment, that Thomas purchases men of colour. I wanted these images to be outrageous, to really provoke a level of anger—but somehow that doesn't seem to be as integral to the viewing experience as I thought they would be.”

Ethnic identity has been a constant enigma in Egoyan's films—the jigsaw piece that always refuses to fit. Many of his films draw on Egoyan's situation as a film-maker on one hand committed to a post-modern notion of identity constructed through technology, and on the other involved with his own Armenian origins, with all the connotations they carry of a ‘pure,’ ‘natural’ identity and unmediated history. It's a situation he analysed in uncomfortably personal terms in his 1993 film Calendar, made for German TV. Egoyan himself appears as a photographer obsessed with the wife who left him on a visit to Armenia (played by his own wife, and regular star, Arsinée Khanjian). His hardest film to watch—both formally and for the discomfort it evokes—Calendar is still the fullest résumé of Egoyan's therapeutic mechanisms.

“I'm a prisoner of the situation I've been talking about—we do have an inexplicable desire to make a metaphor of our own neuroses. That's what art is about—all the characters in my films are failed or unrecognised artists. Francis is directing his life. The adjuster is a director. They are all involved in a process that I am myself am engaged in. I make a film like Calendar to come to terms with that process. You believe that by putting yourself in a context where there's cultural fragmentation and dissociation, you will deal with your own sense of dislocation—you normalise your own worst fears. It becomes perverse when you set into motion the machinery which may define the level of destruction you find in the film itself.”

Egoyan's films are undoubtedly as perverse as they might conceivably be therapeutic. They're scarcely a feel-good experience for the viewer; they don't provide catharsis as easy relief. And as a film-maker, he is surely aware that by working through your own anxieties on screen, you're less likely to quell them than you are to reaffirm their centrality. If you pick up Pandora's box, that neat package spinning round on the baggage carousel, then sooner or later, you have to take it through Customs.

Still, the intensely self-referential manner in which Egoyan works does offer some immediate consolations. “The most important thing,” he says, “is to be open about the process, at every opportunity to demystify the process of making films—there's nothing romantic about it at all. If my work only serves to illustrate the contradictions and perversities of making images of that, I'll be happy.”