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.