1960: Born in Cairo, Egypt.
1984: Next of Kin.
1987: Family Viewing.
1989: Speaking Parts.
1991: The Adjuster.
1994: Exotica.
1997: The Sweet Hereafter.
1999: Felicia’s Journey.
2002: Ararat.
2005: Where the Truth Lies.
The son of Armenian refugees, Atom Egoyan was born in Egypt but soon moved to British Columbia, so he comes naturally by his career-long obsession with familial interaction and cultural alienation. Though unapologetically Canadian, Egoyan has become an international presence in world cinema.
His first two films announced his themes quite explicitly -- Next of Kin and Family Viewing -- though any of his films might be called sex, lies and videotape, if that title weren’t already taken. With Speaking Parts and The Adjuster, Egoyan continued to center in on his dominant concerns and to develop his style and working methods. The style is consciously enigmatic and offbeat, and the method requires a stable of regular actors to embody his personal visions, led by his wife Arsinee Khanjian.
Egoyan himself is quite explicit about his method: “I encourage audiences to be aware that I am photographing people and to be deeply suspicious of my reasons for doing so.” So, true to his early influences, Beckett and Pinter, he never allows viewers to slip into the illusion that they know what’s going on, that they have a firm grip on reality.
Egoyan’s obsession with voyeurism blossoms in his breakout film, Exotica, a steamy yet intellectual mind massage, without a happy ending, set in a dance club of the same name. Egoyan regular Bruce Greenwood is a square sort of patron, a taxman mysteriously obsessed with Mia Kirshner, whose schoolgirl striptease gets everybody hot and bothered, including the cynical emcee Elias Koteas. The strip joint owner is the director’s wife, very pregnant with their son-to-be Arshile, which reinforces that Egoyan is always making a twisted sort of home movie, on the contested ground between fantasy and reality, anxiety and desire.
He crossed over more than one border in next adapting Russell Banks’ novel, The Sweet Hereafter, which earned him an Oscar nomination for best director. He brought most of his regular actors with him, augmented by Ian Holm and Sarah Polley, plus his hypnotic focus on an isolated community responding to the worst kind of tragedy in its midst, a lethal schoolbus accident. For me, his obsessions muddy up a crystalline novel, but one must still admire the way he made adapted material entirely and powerfully his own, and reached a much wider audience.
He next adapted another of my favorite novelists, William Trevor, with Felicia’s Journey, another anxious tale of sexual obsession, compounded of familial horror and humor. Bob Hoskins is a fastidious Midlands catering manager, who takes an unsettling interest in Felicia, an abjectly pregnant Irish colleen in search of her absconding boyfriend.
In Ararat, Egoyan returns full-bore to his own personal obsessions -- his Armenian heritage, life in exile, the ambiguous consolations of memory and media, art and history, family and culture. He achieves a documentary of inner states, a cinema verite of haunted emotions.
Turning outward again, his forthcoming Where the Truth Lies plumbs the break-up of a Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis-like duo, played by Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon. It debuted this year at Cannes, and will have its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. It’s hard to know what drew Egoyan to the story, but you can bet the result will be a very personal film beneath the Hollywood veneer.
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