The Great Movies III

The film is often linked with Truffaut's The Wild Child (1970), set in the same century, about a boy who emerged from the forest possibly having been raised by animals. A psychologist tries to "civilize" him, but cannot change his essential nature. Kaspar is also the subject of study, and there is a professor in the film who tests Kaspar with the riddle about the two villages, one populated by those who could not tell the truth, and the other by those who could not lie. When you meet a man on a path to the two villages, Kaspar is asked, what is the one question you must ask him to determine which village he comes from? "I would ask him if he is a tree frog," Kaspar answers with some pride.

Then there is the foppish English dandy Lord Stanhope, who introduces Kaspar as his "protege," only to find that his protege does not like being on exhibit at fancy dress balls. Kaspar seems happy enough to allow the village to pay off its debts as an exhibit in a sideshow, however, along with a Brazilian flautist who believes that if he ever stops playing, the village will die. To prove he is Brazilian, he speaks in his own tongue, forgetting his prophecy.

The film's German title translates as "Every Man for Himself and God against All."That seems to summarize Kaspar's thinking. The mystery of the captive's origins has occupied investigators ever since he first appeared. Was he the secret heir to a throne? A rich man's love child? We have glimpses of the man who held him prisoner and then set him free, standing behind him and kicking his boots to force him to walk. Who is this man? He is never explained. He may be the embodiment of Kaspar's fate. We may all have somebody behind us, kicking our boots. We are poor mortals, but it dreams to us that we can fly.

ex for money sometimes conceals great sadness. It can be sought to treat wounds it cannot heal. I believe that may happen less in actual prostitution than in the parody of prostitution offered in "gentleman's clubs." Whatever is going on is less about sex than psychological need, sometimes on both sides. Atom Egoyan's Exotica is a deep, painful film about those closed worlds of stage-managed lust.

It is also a tender film about a lonely and desperate man, and a woman who is kind to him. How desperate and how kind are only slowly revealed. In a technical sense, this is a "hyperlink movie," in which characters are revealed to be connected in ways they may not know about. But Egoyan, who also wrote the film, surprises us in how slowly he reveals the links and even more slowly reveals what the characters know about them. When the film ends, you sit regarding the screen, putting together what you have just learned and using it to think again about what went before.

The critic Bryant Frazer wrote that after the film played in the 1994 New York Film Festival, a woman asked Egoyan what had happened at the end. Egoyan was "visibly perturbed" by the question, he said, but finally responded. Frazer writes, "Here is what the last scene in the film meant, he explained, his four-or five-word declamation a stark and numbing negation of the gentle, almost languid spirit of the film, which invites the audience to its own discovery. The `what happened' is simple enough to explain, but you can't really understand it unless you're fully caught up in the cinema when it unfolds in front of you."

Frazer is right: there is no mystery at the end, except the mysteries of human nature that Egoyan evokes. What you think about those will define the film's importance to you. For me, they make it a cry of sympathy for people suffering from loss and guilt, and also an affirmation about how others are willing to understand them. A film can only get so far by simply stating its message; if the message is that easily defined, why bother with the film? Exotica does what many good films do and implies its troubled feelings. Nothing is solved at the end, except that we have learned to understand the characters.

Exotica takes place in a Toronto strip club, but not one of those hellholes of expense-account executives and drunken bachelor parties. This club seems to fill the special needs of the men who go there, although we learn only about one. He is Francis (Bruce Greenwood), who every night buys the company of Christina (Mia Kirshner). She looks young, dresses in a school uniform, opens her shirt before him, and then they talk softly and intensely.