Carry That Weight: The Films of Atom Egoyan

In Next of Kin, Family Viewing, and Speaking Parts, Egoyan had mixed and matched from a repertory of fearless if stilted actors, including David Hemblen, Gabrielle Rose, and his partner Arsinée Khanjian. The Adjuster benefitted immeasurably from the casting of Koteas, whose terse, impacted acting style proved a perfect fit. Playing a resourceful manipulator whose personal and professional control-freakery meets its match and then some in a pair of married, obscenely deep-pocketed foils (Maury Chaykin and Rose), Koteas is like a walking Rorschach blot, as oddly remote from himself as he is from others.

“I wanted to make a film about believable people doing believable things in an unbelievable way,” Egoyan wrote in his director’s note, an explanation that could just as easily be inverted to say unbelievable things in a believable way. Beginning with Noah’s in-home archery exhibition and proceeding through a series of controlledly surreal set pieces pitched between sketch comedy and performance art, The Adjuster observes a certain absurdist logic by which anything that can be done—by the characters and by the director—is worth trying. By the end, every non sequitur has been accounted for, while the link between its wealthy antagonists’ cathartic, self-subsidized fantasias and Egoyan’s own filmmaking process has been made explicit, with Chaykin’s Bubba painstakingly laying dolly track through Noah’s home for Peter Sarossy’s camera to follow as the scene continues. In a parallel and similarly self-reflexive plotline, Noah’s wife, Hera (Khanjian), toils for the Ontario Censor Board, systematically cataloguing smut in the interest of a public decency she enthusiastically repudiates in private.

That Khanjian is Egoyan’s supreme collaborator is hard to argue against. She’s appeared in twelve of his features, winning a best-actress Genie Award for Ararat and etching a number of memorably bold, intensely physical performances. In The Adjuster, her fearless abandon in pantomiming masturbation in a variety of environments consolidates the film’s daring. One way into the homemade cinematic labyrinth of Calendar (1993) is to see it as scenes from a marriage, with Khanjian cast as the wife of a lachrymose photographer (Egoyan) who attempts to extend his infatuation through a camera lens but ends up helplessly documenting her romance with a third party while they’re all overseas. Egoyan’s decision to play the shutterbug manifests at first as a Woody Allen–like gambit, especially in the early-nineties context of the film’s release—an alternate title could have been Husbands and Wives—but the director’s celebrity (such as it is) is of minimal importance to the film. As in Next of Kin, the theme is culture clash: both Egoyan and Khanjian’s characters are Armenian expatriates, and the husband’s professional, mercenary mandate to shoot portraits of twelve historical churches for an exoticizing mass-market calendar exposes a growing disconnect within his marriage as well as with his birthplace. Unable to speak the language, he’s rendered a bystander; in the words of Gang of Four, at home, he feels like a tourist. Calendar’singenious structure is split between the handheld, docufictional passages in Armenia—twelve in all, each corresponding to a picture in the completed calendar—and a set of disarmingly artificial episodes back in Toronto, where Egoyan arranges in-home dinner dates with the multicultural employees of an escort service. Ostensibly presented as potential revenge fucks, these brief encounters are something else entirely: gradually, we see that the women are going through a series of scripted motions at their host’s behest, in a humorously compulsive—or is it simply creepy?—attempt to ritualize and sublimate the pain of his recent separation.

A puzzle box with multiple keys, Calendar is at once the most playful and most cryptic of Egoyan’s early films, and its rigorous minimalism was catnip to the academic and critical constituencies fixing to anoint him as the great hope of English-Canadian cinema. In the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum called the film a “flat-out masterpiece,” analyzing it as an inventory of the director’s recurring interests—“video, photography, voyeurism, sexual obsession, troubled families, and personal identity”—while arguing that it connected more directly, and effectively, to pressing questions of ethnicity and history: “[it] all dovetails into the issue of tribalism . . . and it’s hard to think of another subject in the world at the moment that has more immediate relevance and resonance.” As a precisely triangulated meditation on artistry, assimilation, and commodification—with an additional layer of meaning concerning the ontological relationship between photography and video—Calendar showed how formidable its maker’s skill set could be even as the vast majority of the Armenian scenes were purportedly improvised, smuggling an unprecedented spontaneity into Egoyan’s fixed system.

If Calendar represented Egoyan’s sensibility at its most casually expansive, Exotica was a return to the pent-up, lurid abstraction of The Adjuster, with an even more involuted plotline. In place of “believable people doing believable things in an unbelievable way,” the director conjured up a company of morosely cosmopolitan caricatures, ciphers skillfully puppeteered through a shapely roundelay of fateful run-ins, expository monologues, and painfully excavated traumas—an average of one per customer. The film has the skin of a psychological thriller, with Bruce Greenwood’s lonely tax auditor Francis scanning as potentially capable of violence as he returns nightly to the eponymous strip club to gaze at the bookish dancer Christina (Mia Kirshner). Francis’s obvious fondness for Christina’s jailbait act rhymes ominously with his relationship with his preteen niece (Sarah Polley), as does the fact that the “babysitting” gigs he pays the latter for involve her practicing music in an empty apartment with no children in sight.

The question of what Francis is hiding, and how his tragic backstory intersects at multiple vertices with that of his client Thomas (Don McKellar), a pet store owner smuggling hyacinth eggs into Toronto, is one that Exotica takes its time answering. As a diversionary tactic, the film offers up its main location’s sweltering hothouse atmosphere as its own self-contained form of enticement, and with the help of a marketing campaign that played up Exotica’s (and Exotica’s) overtly sexualized elements—including Khanijan as a pregnant, bewigged madam and Koteas as a purring, insinuating master of ceremonies whose patter splits the difference between Gig Young in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and Joel Grey in Cabaret (1972)—the film was a box-office hit straight out of the gate, riding Miramax’s post–Pulp Fiction imprimatur to more than $5 million in the United States alone. Three years later, a Cannes competition slot and two high-end Oscar nominations for The Sweet Hereafter (1997) would solidify Egoyan’s status in the front ranks of North American directors.