July 30, 2005

Happy if the latest Atom bombs
By Tom Charity

Atom Egoyan, Canada’s second most famous film-maker (David
Cronenberg gets the top spot), was born in Cairo to Armenian immigrants.
They named him after Egypt’s first nuclear reactor – “it could have been
worse”, he has noted, drily – then moved to Victoria, British Columbia.
He completed a BA in international relations and has been pursuing the
thought ever since. At least, themes of national identity, alienation
and desire haunt his work, which is often cerebral and darkly comic, but
also more emotional than he is generally given credit for.
A deep strain of grief runs through his films. The
Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter (1997) dissects a community
struggling to come to terms with a tragic school bus accident, while
Ararat (2002) confronts the genocide of the Armenian people by the
Ottomans. In the earlier films The Adjuster (1991) and Exotica (1994),
both coming out on DVD for the first time this week, the melancholia is
laced with mystery, black comedy and eroticism.

Exotica is a series of interwoven tales set around a
stripclub. In The Adjuster Noah Render (Elias Koteas) is an insurance
claims investigator who is equal parts priest, therapist and Santa Claus
to his clients, but a complete enigma to his estranged wife. He promises
restitution and administers sexual salve to the victims of fire and
natural disaster – drawing strength from his own compassion.

“His tragedy is that his power lasts only as long as it
takes for people to get their things back,” notes Egoyan, on the phone
from Toronto. “I was very interested in this notion the French have,
déformation professionnelle: that your job defines you and deforms
you.”

The seed for the movie was a huge fire at Egoyan’s parents’
home in British Columbia in 1990. “In our case the adjuster was just a
regular guy in a ski jacket, but we were so devastated, we couldn’t help
projecting so much more on to him,” he recalls. “He was the person who
had to decide whether or not we were telling the truth; if there really
had been a Bang and Olufsen under that heap of ashes in the corner. He
was like this strange angel of the material world.”

There had been talk of an American cable TV spin-off after
the film came out, and 15 years on there is renewed interest – Egoyan
has recently written a pilot for it. Perhaps America has some psychic
need to believe that, come what may, there’s an adjuster waiting in the
wings to come in and redeem their material effects.

“I realised I hadn’t written anything completely original
since Exotica in a way,” Egoyan says. “Even with Ararat I was drawing on
historical material, and there was so much political pressure on that
project that I didn’t feel I was completely in my own world. So I’ve
been enjoying going back to it, and I find that elements of Exotica are
creeping in, too. The notion of a babysitter-confessor, for example.
There was a whole draft of Exotica written around her.”

Like most independents, Egoyan is still trying to square the
equation between making the films that interest him and the films that
financiers think might interest an audience. “The Adjuster and Exotica
were made with total freedom,” he says. “I had an extraordinary
relationship with Alliance Atlantis at the time. All I had to give them
was the title and the final copy. I didn’t have to worry about what
anyone thought.”

As it turned out, Exotica became his most commercially
successful film, after Miramax marketed it as an erotic thriller. “All
these clubs called Exotica started to spring up everywhere,” he recalls,
sounding rather bemused.

Things are different now. His latest feature was first shown
at Cannes, to mixed reviews. He describes Where the Truth Lies, which
stars Alison Lohman, Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, as an “entirely
commercially driven project” – his first. At the same time, he and his
wife, Arsinée Khanjian, have returned from Lebanon with a film they
shot on mini-DV. The Citadel has “no commercial expectation at all,” he
says. “I love it.”

“You make a film because you think there’s an audience for
it, and in my case it wasn’t until mercifully late that I realised how
deluded I was. Most people are not drawn to the notion of mystery or
obfuscation, most people are not drawn to feeling self conscious in the
cinema. They just want to lose themselves.”

It sounds as though he is worried about a little
déformation professionnelle himself. And he isn’t encouraged by a
recent visit to graduate philosophy students in Switzerland. “I showed
them Where the Truth Lies and my second feature, Speaking Parts, which I
got really excited about watching again. This college was the last place
Jacques Derrida ever spoke, and they were all schooled in this language.
Overwhelmingly they preferred Where the Truth Lies.”

Not many film-makers would be dejected about a thumbs-up to
their latest movie. But then not many would choose a Leonard Cohen dirge
as the soundtrack to a stripper’s dance routine either. Atom Egoyan has
always been at his best when he’s unhappy about something – mourning
seems to become him. So maybe there’s something to be cheerful about
after all.

a..
The Adjuster and Exotica are released on DVD on Monday