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1/30/2023 0 Comments exotica (spine 1150) Exotica
Directed by: Atom Egoyan 1994 Spine #1150 You have to ask yourself, what brought the person to this point? What we’re seeing in his face, his manner that channeled him here. You have to convince yourself that this person has something hidden that you have to find. Check his bags… though it’s his face, his gestures that you’re really watching. He’s staring straight at you. Look at him. Carefully. What do you see? Most people understandably regard the Russell Banks adaptation The Sweet Hereafter as Atom Egoyan’s magnum opus, but its predecessor - Exotica - is the film that feels like the culmination of all the themes - voyeurism, human connection, familial damage, identity - that consumed the Canadian filmmaker’s early work. The above dialogue is recited by a customs agent in the film’s opening scene, and speaks to Egoyan’s fixation with the inscrutability of one’s inner being. If the eyes are the window to the soul, what happens when every character’s are permanently shaded? Exotica was marketed as an erotic thriller, though it’s not particularly erotic, nor is it much of a thriller - though there’s a vague undercurrent of danger that underscores the entire movie, as if the fragile dynamic between its characters could shatter in the space of a drawn breath. The story revolves around the titular Toronto strip club (vaguely jungle-themed), where viewers are dropped in blindly and left to unravel the narrative knot binding the main characters. Tax auditor Francis (Bruce Greenwood) is a broken man whose soul has seemingly been permeated by an unspoken grief - each day he pays his teenage niece Tracey (Sarah Polley) to sit in his empty house and practice the piano, while he heads to Exotica and requests a private dance from Christina (Mia Kirshner)… who performs on-stage in a schoolgirl outfit to Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.” Christina has a romantic history with the club’s DJ Eric (Elias Koteas), who seems preoccupied - if not outright obsessed - with the bond of mutual dependency she and Francis appear to share. Somehow this all connects in turn to Thomas (Don McKeller), an introverted gay man who runs an exotic pet store and smuggles rare bird eggs into the country. “Labyrinthine” is the word most often used to described Egoyan’s work, and it’s both appropriate and somewhat overstated. The film doesn’t suffer from tortured denseness; there’s a slippery ease to how the narrative pieces settle into place… and once they do, the revelations are satisfying, if not necessarily earth-shaking. Egoyan is more like a street artist, performing a sleight-of-hand trick that’s perhaps a little more intricate than it needs to be. Much of his cinema has a built-in layer of obfuscation - it’s an indulgent but forgivable flourish. More intriguing is the director’s interest in the transactional nature of human interaction - which makes a strip club an appropriate hub for the lives of his characters to converge. “He gets what he needs from me… and I get what I need from him,” Christina says cryptically, of her relationship with Francis (there’s something fitting about her remaining clothed during her stage routines - if you interpret a striptease as the allegorical act of shedding layers until all is laid bare, she reveals precious little of herself). But transactions inform every facet of the movie. Francis pays Tracey for “babysitting,” even though there’s a tacit understanding that the term is farcical. Exotica’s owner Zoe (Egoyan’s real-life wife Arsinee Khanjian) is pregnant with Eric’s child, but there’s no romantic connection between them. Eventually Francis presents Thomas with a quid pro quo offer that he’s in no position to reject. Thomas himself begins picking up men under the guise of having an extra ballet ticket, then returning their money afterwards - an opportunity for connection without intimacy (the one time he crosses that line, it results in the film’s one goofy plotting misstep). Ultimately, we come to understand the sense of shared trauma that unites the characters and - to quote Tolkien - "in the darkness bind them." Each of them, in their own way, is searching for that sliver of normalcy to cling to, no matter how temporary or fleeting. The entire cast - consisting predominantly of Egoyan regulars - is quite good, but it’s Sarah Polley - just 15 at the time - who somehow leaves the most lingering impression… even though Tracey is very much a secondary role (Polley, to her credit, has successfully segued into a full-time filmmaking career… but she really was a gifted actress, and was even better in The Sweet Hereafter). Egoyan himself has largely drifted into irrelevance in recent years, but for a brief moment in the 90s his cinematic viewpoint crystallized into something that felt singular and strange. It too proved transient… but in that instant, his own eyes were left momentarily unshaded.
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1/12/2023 0 Comments klute (spine 987) Klute
Directed by: Alan J. Pakula 1971 Spine #987 Klute, released in 1971 and directed by Alan J. Pakula, reflects a certain determination - seen throughout the decade - to marry the psychological dimensions of a gritty character study with a thriller’s lurid grip. It’s not hard to see the appeal. Splicing together the DNA of Sidney Lumet and Brian De Palma has the potential for cinematic Xanadu, but equilibrium is exceptionally tricky to achieve - one half invariably overwhelms the other. And such is the case with Klute, which proves a genuinely outstanding character study… and a rather mediocre thriller. It’s hard to imagine beginning an analysis of the film anywhere other than with Jane Fonda, who won a well-deserved Oscar for playing New York call girl Bree Daniels. She is, to put it plainly, absolutely tremendous. Like… pantheon-level great. Her performance helped usher in a newfound emphasis on frank realism and interior dimension, and over fifty years later it still carries a revelatory power (Fonda spent a week in the company of real-life prostitutes during pre-production, which simply convinced her that she was all wrong for the role). Bree isn’t the proverbial hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, nor is she a tragic figure or an object of pity - there’s a matter-of-factness to her portrayal that’s initially disarming… but Fonda offers so many different shades to the character - defiance, edginess, vibrancy, bitterness. This is, unquestionably, one of the great, multifaceted performances of 70s cinema, and reason alone to make a specific point of checking out the movie post-haste. Bree is an aspiring actress, and she has talent - just not enough to rise above the noise (early on we see her at a casting call for a cosmetics ad, in which the girls are brusquely dismissed for a variety of Seinfeldian reasons - Bree’s hands are deemed “weird-looking”). Instead, her abilities are put to use while turning tricks, such as when we see her put a john at ease with a seductive purr that’s utterly hypnotic. But that cool air of self-possession cracks in an astonishing series of scenes with Bree’s therapist - supposedly all but completely improvised by Fonda - which take on the air of stark confessionals delivered directly to the audience. I feel this time, that’s what’s different. I mean, I feel, my body feels, I enjoy, uh… making love with him. Which, uh… is a very baffling and bewildering thing for me, because I’ve never felt that before. I just wish I could let things happen and, uh, enjoy it, you know, for what it is and while it lasts and, uh… relax about it. But ALL THE TIME, all the time, I keep feeling the need to destroy it, to break it off, to go back to the comfort of being numb again. So far this doesn’t sound like much of a thriller. Enter John Klute (Donald Sutherland), a detective whose best friend, Tom Gruneman, came to the Big Apple on business six months ago and never returned. It’s assumed he’s on the lam, or met some seedy demise (as one tends to do when venturing into the big, bad city), but Klute remains unconvinced - even after the authorities uncover an obscene letter Gruneman supposedly wrote to Bree, which constitutes his primary lead (the film teases the idea of New York City as a corrupting influence - a place where a morally upright family man can indulge his dark side and allow it to take root). Pakula, who made paranoia his stock-and-trade in the 70s (he’d go on to direct The Parallax View and All the President’s Men), and DP Gordon Willis generate a thick, at times palpable atmosphere of dread, accentuated by Michael Small’s unsettling score. But what they achieve is mostly a tonal baseline, an overarching sense of mood… rarely tethered to actual suspense or narrative propulsion. The few scenes that actually adhere to the tenets of the thriller genre are staged with no particular panache (or even logic). The mystery surrounding Gruneman’s fate is paper-thin and more or less tipped well in advance of the denouement. These plot elements feel like a commercial garnish; it's almost like the complete inverse of a giallo picture, in which psychological nuance is typically sacrificed in the name of salacious sensation. If you’re wondering why on earth the film is called Klute, the character was initially written as the protagonist - an incorruptible outsider who arrives, like a Western hero, in an urban sprawl of sin to set things right. It was Pakula, working in tandem with Fonda, who recognized how much more textured and compelling the story would be if it were tilted in Bree’s direction instead. With that in mind, he could hardly have picked a better leading man than Sutherland, whose self-effacing performance is all quiet constraint and observation. It’s a generously deferential turn, so internalized that Klute’s facial expression rarely even changes (sadly, it’s also a reminder why Sutherland - inexplicably - has never even received an Oscar nomination, let alone won; this sort of disciplined and understated work is far too easy to overlook). In the end, neither Klute nor New York City rub off on the other in any notable way; it’s Bree, caught between the two, whose fate is left up in the air. And the fact she’s unlikely to ever be fulfilled by either is the great tragedy of the character - and, by extension, the film itself. |
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