Exotica: Formula for Seduction

After emerging with a series of shorts—including Howard in Particular (1979), After Grad with Dad (1980), and Peep Show (1981)—Egoyan graduated to long form with Next of Kin (1984), which earned him a Best Director nomination at the Genie Awards (then the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars) and received theatrical distribution around the world. The filmmaker would also continue to experiment with the short form later in his career, notably with the anthology-film contributions En passant (1991) and Artaud Double Bill (2007). (Both of these shorts are featured, alongside the strip-club-set Peep Show, on this release.) But with the four increasingly acclaimed features that followed Next of Kin—Family Viewing (1987), Speaking Parts (1989), The Adjuster (1991), and Calendar (1993)—Egoyan continued to display a captivating formal control and a skill for character depth.

Calendar (also included as a supplement on this release), which features Egoyan himself in the central role of a photographer whose wife leaves him for the guide conducting their tour of rural Armenian churches, concludes with the photographer returning to Toronto to obsessively replay the video he took as the relationship blossomed between his wife and their guide. Intimate, funny, and moving, Calendar is about the act of looking and the constant revisiting of the past as if it were possible to change or edit it—and thus, in many ways, it is a perfect companion piece to the film Egoyan would make next, Exotica. Furthermore, Egoyan recalls, “with both projects, I was very aware of creating a way of telling the story that would reflect the inner worlds of the characters. It was a conscious decision to use the opportunities afforded to explore the ‘awareness’ of these characters coming to terms with their fractured lives.”

If Egoyan could have been previously considered a cult figure with a dedicated but niche following on the art-house circuit, the extensive acclaim for Exotica established him once and for all as a director of international renown. After premiering at Cannes, where it won the FIPRESCI prize and became the first Egoyan film to play in official competition, Exotica was released in more than fifty territories worldwide—successfully grossing $5.13 million in North America—and in its native Canada played theatrically for more than half a year. It went on to collect eight Genie Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.

Since completing Exotica, the director has continued to create without concession to compromise at the forefront of world cinema, gaining Academy Award nominations for The Sweet 
Hereafter (1997) and mainstream commercial success with Chloe (2009). From Ararat (2002) to Adoration (2008) to Remember (2015), his work remains provocative, in the best sense of the word: highly personal, formally experimental, and thematically interested in transgressions both large and small. But in Egoyan’s own estimation, as well as that of many critics, Exotica “perhaps marks the high-level mark for what I do. I’m grateful I got to make it the way I did, and that all the feelings I had about life at that point found their way into this movie. I’m also so lucky that the international festivals could launch a film and a career the way they did back then.” The film was a success, but its marketing did prove problematic. Sensing a commercial breakthrough, and willing to play up the titillating sound of the title, the U.S. distributor Miramax advertised Exotica in such a way as to exaggerate its sexual content and violence, creating a misleading impression of the film that shortchanged its emotional complexities.

Completed with a larger budget than Egoyan had been previously afforded, the film is mostly set within the confines of a jungle-themed pleasure dome—the titular strip club—where men watch women perform, and occasionally request private dances at their tables. Drawn into this world is Francis (Bruce Greenwood), the grieving father of a murdered schoolgirl. Seemingly obsessed with Christina (Mia Kirshner), a dancer who happens to perform as a schoolgirl, Francis attracts the scrutiny of Eric (Elias Koteas), the club emcee and Christina’s former boyfriend—though it is only later on that we learn the way in which Eric and Francis are actually inextricably connected. The film is narratively dense enough to also include a pet-shop owner, Thomas (Don McKellar), who smuggles rare bird eggs; Francis’s young niece, Tracey (Sarah Polley in an early, pivotal role), who used to babysit his daughter; and club owner Zoe, who, like many of the characters in the film, is bound to another by a sort of contract (she is carrying a child fathered by Eric, though they have no romantic attachment). Through these characters, the film explores the grip of the past while also examining how people seek, at their own peril, to blot it out or reconstruct it.

As Egoyan’s films often do, Exotica shows the way that video images can be implicated in isolating the past (and in making it appear malleable). This occurs most notably with the home movie shot by Francis, glimpsed several times throughout the film, in which his wife and daughter are playing the piano and his wife playfully tries to get him to put down the camera. But in a departure for Egoyan, Exotica is ultimately, in its investigation of the act of looking, more concerned with live performance than video. “A video image—no matter the material it contains—is apparently a reliable conduit of information, even if the things it is recording are erratic and volatile. It can also be erased and manipulated—I’m thinking of the earlier films here, like Family Viewing and Speaking Parts—but the material it contains is imprinted and a record of something that happened,” asserts Egoyan. “What excited me about the club was that the viewer was witnessing something observed, both by the clients and by the security systems installed in the structure itself. Not only do you have the observation post of the DJ’s ‘perch,’ but there’s also a system of two-way mirrors installed within the walls. The live performances are structured to be watched like a panopticon, so that the Exotica club holds the viewers and performers captive.”

Exotica—which achieves a masterly balance of formal daring, narrative complexity, and emotional heft—begins with two Canadian customs officials behind a two-way mirror, watching travelers’ bags being searched at the airport (a motif the director would later return to in Ararat). One of the officers observes, “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. You check his bags, but it’s his face, his gestures, that you are really watching.” These words are a map to Exotica, which is, ultimately, about looking beyond the surface of a person to see what is going on underneath. They also act as a dependable guide for those who wish to journey deeper into any of Egoyan’s other meticulously constructed, but entirely accessible, labyrinthine worlds.

All quotes in this essay attributed to Atom Egoyan are from an interview Jason Wood conducted with the director for this release in April and May 2022.