The Great Movies III

Watching this is the club DJ, Eric (Elias Koteas), who stands on a perch above the action and contributes an insinuating commentary on the lives below. Also watching, from behind one-way mirrors, is the pregnant Zoe (Arsinee Khanjian), who inherited the club from her mother.' he decor creates a tropical club heavy with palm fronds, the music slinks between the tables, the lighting is an oddly muted garishness, gloom cut with neon reds, greens, and blues. Egoyan's camera glides around the room, pausing to regard Francis and Christina. Whatever they're talking about hardly seems to be sex and seems to absorb them equally.' he DJ notices this.

Other characters are implicated. The opening shots of the film show customs officers scrutinizing an arrival on a flight from the Far East, through a one-way mirror. This is Thomas, who we discover is smuggling rare macaw eggs. At the airport, a man suggests they share a ride to town and pays his share of the ride with two ballet tickets. Thomas gives one of the tickets to a good-looking gay man outside the theater, and they even tually spend the night together. The man was one of the customs officers. He confiscates the eggs, but wants to see Thomas again. Thomas's pet shop is audited under suspicion of illegal imports-by Francis, who later wants him to help eavesdrop on Christina. You see how the subterranean connections link.

I have made Exotica seem to be all complexities. Following the connections is straightforward. Deciding what they mean is the challenge. Egoyan has not unfolded the plot as simply as I summarized it, and he uses other suggestive characters. There is Tracey (Sarah Polley, then fifteen), the young girl Francis hires every night to babysit while he is visiting the club. But it's other than babysitting. At the club, he's a client of Christina, who dresses as a schoolgirl; does this suggest he has a sexual interest in Tracey? What does Tracey's father think of the arrangement?

Enough of the plot. Let's draw back to admire Egoyan's method. If we do not at first understand all of the relationships between the characters, they do not all understand them themselves, and in certain ways never figure them out.' That provides the film with hidden emotional currents as powerful as those that are visible. When you think through the film later, you realize how much some of the characters never know, and yet how important it has been to the outcome. Egoyan isn't weaving these strands simply to divert us with a labyrinth; he is suggesting the hidden ways in which we affect other lives with our choices and behavior even though unaware.

Beneath everything pulses the atmosphere of the club Exotica, its promise of sexuality masking deeper needs and obsessions. The grave voice of Leonard Cohen and the starkness of his songs, played by Eric the DJ, seem wrong for a strip club, but not for this one, where not desire but desperation is catered to. The advertising, selling a sexy thriller, is all wrong.

Zoe, the club owner, is in some ways the spirit of the film. She is very pregnant, very happy about it, very convinced that her mother created the club in a special way for a special clientele with special needs. She knows more about some of the clients than they realize. She is worried about the tension between Eric and Christina. She meets with Francis after he is thrown out of the club. She wants to restore peace and order, and I won't tell you why that is so difficult for her.

Atom Egoyan, born in 196o in Egypt of Armenian parents, brought up in Canada, has consistently stepped outside the mainstream in style and subjects. He's fascinated by how people are kept separated by the realities of culture (ethnicity, gender, background) and walls of images, and how they try to get through or around them. One of the most uncompromising of major directors, he hasn't made a single film for solely commercial reasons.

Egoyan is best known for The Sweet Hereafter, which won the grand jury prize at Cannes 1997; Felicia'sJourney (1998); and Where the Truth Lies, that remarkable zoos film with Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a team not unlike Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, implicated in a murder. He often works with his wife, Arsinee Khanjian, who like Ingrid Bergman has the ability to project carnality and sweetness simultaneously. Egoyan brought his first feature, the $20,ooo Next of Kin, to the Toronto Film Festival in 1984. He was only twenty-four.

There is a quality in all of his work that resists the superficial and facile. Even at the very start, he wasn't interested in simple storytelling. He is drawn to what Fitzgerald called the dark night of the soul. Secrets, shames, the hidden, and the forbidden coil around his characters, but he is not quick to condemn them. He and Khanjian are warm, friendly, and smile easily, and in the films, you sense love for the characters and the belief that to know more is to forgive more.