ATOM EGOYAN’S ADORATION IN THE INTERNET AGE
by Karin Badt

MovieMaker Magazine
rticle/atom_egoyan_adoration_at_cannes_20080619/
J une 20 2008
NY

The press alternately booed and applauded the Cannes premiere of Atom
Egoyan’s new film, Adoration, and few came to greet the director at his
press conference. Granted the film, which tells of a boy who reinvents
the mundane story of his parents’ death as an international terrorist
conspiracy only to face the truth at the end, falls as flat as the bomb
that never went off on the plane. Still, the high-minded intellectual
ambitions of the director were apparent and intriguing throughout,
echoing the themes of his more successful films such as Exotica and
Felicia’s Journey. The boy constructs his myth of his parents by
borrowing the story of an Arab who arranged for his pregnant wife
to detonate en route to Tel Aviv.The boy’s French teacher becomes
obsessed with the boy’s construction.The scenes are contrived, the
acting stilted and yet one cannot help but busily think during the
screening: What inspires us to construct stories about our lives?

Can one story ever contain the conflicts between a family, let alone
between rival groups?

In the end, there is a "true story" that seems to wrap up all the
threads, bringing the disjointed characters–the boy, the teacher and
his strange uncle–into a harmonious web. Yet even this satisfaction
seems like a momentary pause in the ongoing journey of narrative need.

Atom Egoyan, a sincere-looking intellectual with boyish dark eyes
and a warm regard, leaned forward at the podium with an excited air
as he explicated the sub-topics of his film–many of which were more
captivating, unfortunately, in his telling than in the production. He
explained that the various "props" in his movie–a Christmas nativity
decoration, a violin, a burka–were "fetish objects for something else,
ways of dealing with loss." The film’s title, Adoration, alludes to
how the characters adore each other, but sublimate this adoration
into objects, the director explains.

Fetishism is also true of our attachment to technology. Egoyan’s films
obsess over modern methods of communication–cell phones, chat rooms,
video cameras. In this film, the boy puts his constructed story
on the Web, and it becomes the subject of a chat room. While many
critics assume that Egoyan is celebrating our technological ease,
the truth is quite the opposite. "The issue of the Internet is that
we are saturated with intimacy, but the film is about the boy’s own
journey. It is not about the Internet, but about the way the Internet
is used to draw him out. But he becomes overwhelmed by the multitude
of responses in the chat room. All that noise does not solve his
issue. The film is ultimately about finding that one person who can
help us understand our history… I am more concerned with emotional
concerns of people rather than technologies."

We continue the conversation the next day at lunch…. or a sort of
lunch. We journalists had already eaten, and Egoyan, in his enthusiasm
to respond to our questions (one intuits his generous approach to
students in his sideline as a university lecturer), barely connected
his fork to his plate.

Fork suspended, he admits that the issue of our attachment to history,
to cultural props, was personal to him, as an Armenian who grew up
in Egypt and then moved to the west coast of Canada. "We were the
only Armenian family in Victoria, while the rest of our family had
moved to Montreal. What aspects of tradition my family held on to
were very particular. I am obsessed with identity and what I hold
onto to construct identity."

The punchline: We are "burdened by traditional artifacts that we feel
pressured to conserve, but they have lost meaning".

Yet Adoration has a happy ending. The props are dispensed with
(the violin sold) and the boy, his uncle and his teacher convene in
the teacher’s home, agreeing for the first time on one story—and
creating, Egoyan explains, "a new nuclear family."

Perhaps the story of this film does not ultimately work, but stories
themselves can.