"In A
World Of Temptation, Obsession Is The Deadliest Desire" —tagline, Exotica
To
this day, I'm convinced that neither Harvey Weinstein nor his marketing
underlings at Miramax ever saw Atom Egoyan's 1995 film Exotica; either that, or they were so
flummoxed over how to promote it that they decided to pretend like they had
bought another movie. How else to explain the tagline, which doesn't even make
sense on the face of it, let alone describe the movie adequately. "Obsession"
is the only word that applies, but it's neither deadly nor a desire, and the
world of Exotica,
though centered largely on a strip club, has nothing to do with temptation,
since its characters have more pressing things on their minds than merely getting
off. Then there's the poster, with a shot of a stripper writhing under the
spotlight and a pair of menacing eyes looking out from a dark background like a
Dario Argento movie. It's painful to imagine all the viewers duped into
believing they were getting an erotic thriller, then stumbling into dense,
cerebral puzzle picture about voyeurism, memory, and loss. And it's even more
painful to think of the many people who might have loved Exotica if they knew it wasn't the
dumb straight-to-video softcore movie they perceived it to be.
To
cut Miramax some slack for their bait-and-switch, Exotica was never going to be an easy
sell, because to describe it in more than the vaguest terms would be to give
the game away. (And for those who haven't seen it, please take that as your cue
to skedaddle.) Egoyan's delicate conceit gives us five or so major characters,
but doesn't spell out anything right away about who they are or how they might
be connected. All he shows is their behavior and the often curious ways they
interact, deliberately misleading the audience into assuming things that don't
turn out to be true. In a way, the flagrantly deceptive marketing campaign
could be said to serve Egoyan's film, after all: Believing Exotica is a sexy thriller set in a
world of temptation, where obsession is the deadliest desire, isn't the worst
place for an open-minded person to start. Just be prepared to have the rug
pulled out from under you.
Though Exotica
was probably Egoyan's breakthrough to American arthouse audiences—and if
they missed it, 1997's equally superb and more overtly devastating The Sweet
Hereafter was
not far behind—he had already established himself as a perceptive
chronicler of life in the Communication Age. As an undergrad, there wasn't a
film that I championed more vigorously than Egoyan's 1989 gem Speaking Parts, which spoke to a generation
raised on home video and their capacity to construct fictions—and even
have relationships—with images. In Speaking Parts, for example, one character
obsesses over a movie extra and repeatedly rents videos in which he appears in
the background (hence the ironic title); and another tries to honor her
deceased brother by writing a screenplay about him, only to watch it get
compromised so thoroughly that her memories of him are corroded. In Egoyan's
films, there's an invisible force field that separates one character from
another, making them all voyeurs, watching and fantasizing without really
interacting. When that force field is broken, it's a powerful moment, because
it snaps them back to a reality that's been too painful for them to accept.
Exotica tends to draw
love-it-or-hate-it reactions from people, and I suspect that may have something
to do with the fact that Egoyan never puts viewers on terra firma. Instead, he casts them
adrift in a mystery that's not a whodunit, but a whoarethey, and very slowly
peels back the layers until they know how these characters connect and why they
behave the way they do. At times, he deliberately leads us down the wrong path:
Early on, Bruce Greenwood drops off a very young Sarah Polley at her apartment
and hands her a wad of bills peeled from his wallet. What's he paying her for?
A couple scenes before, we saw him pay for a private dance from a stripper with
a schoolgirl image, so it doesn't take much to formulate a shady equation. That
equation, however, would be completely wrong.
The
title refers to perhaps the most anti-erotic club since the post-apocalyptic
XXX cult item Café Flesh, in which so-called "Sex Negatives" (the 99% of the population
that can't copulate) crowd into clubs to watch "Sex Positives" get it on. At
Exotica, the fake palms and Middle Eastern grooves create a thick atmosphere
that's immediately scotched by the running commentary from DJ Elias Koteas ("Bring
those big, hairy palms together, gentleman…") and a stripper, played by Mia
Kirshner, who performs a schoolgirl routine to Leonard Cohen's "Everybody
Knows." Every other night, Kirshner sidles up to Greenwood, a haunted gentleman
who comes only to see her, and the two have a relationship that's clearly
beyond professional. In fact, Kirshner's hips sway just enough to keep management
at bay; what she does for Greenwood is more personal and intimate than getting
him hot and bothered. As we find out later, it's an unusual kind of therapy,
though that's doesn't keep Koteas, who has a different obsession with Kirshner,
from wanting to break it up. Here's Kirshner, "a sassy bit of jailbait," work
her NSFW magic: