Atom Egoyan is watching us

In the first scene of Atom Egoyan's new film, Exotica, which opens this month, a customs officer looking through a one-way window comments on a suspicious-looking traveler: "You have to ask yourself what brought the person to this point." Egoyan has made a career of holding such mirrors up to his audiences. Probing the twisted motives that lead his characters to an emotional brink, the thirty-four-year-old Armenian-Canadian auteur has taken us from the dysfunctional families of Next of Kin (1984) and Family Viewing (1987), to the shell-shocked exurbanites of Speaking Parts (1989) and The Adjuster (1991), to the tormented menages of Calendar (1993) and now Exotica.

Egoyan's films center on the alienation of the individual in a technologically overdeveloped society in which voyeurism and video sex have replaced self-expression and intimacy. Exotica unfolds in a luxurious strip club where each night a tax auditor, Francis (Bruce Greenwood), watches a young dancer, Christina (Mia Kirshner), perform in a schoolgirl's uniform. The auditor's daughter has been murdered, we discover, and he invokes this ritual to work through his grief. Caught in the web of obsession and loss are the pregnant club owner (Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan's wife), its increasingly agonized emcee (Elias Koteas), who has his own history with the dancer, and a gay pet-shop proprietor (Don McKellar) soliciting one-night stands - the same shifty figure who alerted the customs officer.

Sinuous and wrenching, Exotica winds inexorably back to the initial question it poses. When I talked to Egoyan, I wanted to see how much that question applied to this secure, charming man who has directed some of the most disturbing films around.

LAURA WINTERS: Why are you called Atom?

ATOM EGOYAN: Weirdly enough, because there was a nuclear plant built in Egypt the year I was born there. My parents thought that it would be cool to name their son after what was going to be a predominant source of energy for the future. As opposed to calling me "television monitor."

LW: And your sister's name is Eve. . . .

AE: That's where it gets a bit perverse, yeah. [laughs]

LW: The structure of Exotica fascinates me. As a viewer you get so involved in figuring out exactly what's going on.

AE: You're invited to misperceive as well. That's almost part of the experience of the film. Audiences have been very threatened by that type of approach in my previous films, so it's gratifying that some people finally feel comfortable with viewing a film that way. Maybe it's because the characters in this movie seem able to articulate their own psychic landscape and are trying to come to terms with the pain they're feeling. Exotica's texture and architecture is based on a high degree of interaction with the viewer's emotionality, as opposed to a more clinical discourse with the viewer about his desire to watch, which is what the other movies are about.

LW: It's interesting that you don't use video in Exotica the way you did in your earlier films.

AE: When people identify certain techniques with your work, it can be superficial. I became so frustrated about that, because video was never more than a device that I used for a very specific dramatic purpose within my films. A video is a means by which you can enshrine and document aspects of your family or your sexual life or your development, but it's also brutally static. It takes you right back to what was actually happening, and that can be either rewarding or incredibly threatening.

LW: What are the implications of characters making videos of themselves?

AE: I think the decision to record or document something is not as spontaneous or naive as our society has made it seem: It says so much about your own need to fix that moment in time. The process of recording is intrinsically involved with a sense of loss. That's why I think I deal with loss so much in the films I'm making. Cinema for me is all about loss.

LW: Even without video, the whole question of loss and memory - of being confronted with the poignancy of a vanished time - is uppermost in Exotica. What seems especially important in this film is the idea of people bearing witness to each other's pain.

AE: That's what I'm excited about with this film. It deals with exactly the same issues as my other films, but the fact that it is now a theatrical situation between Francis and Christina - where instead of a television screen there's a schoolgirl's uniform - somehow makes it more direct. You're aware that there's an attempt to demystify, to understand, the pain of an event that has changed someone's life.

LW: How so?

AE: Francis's confrontation of this schoolgirl image every night is necessary to his understanding of his own sense of rage and loss. On the one hand, when he says to Christina, "How could anyone hurt you?" he's trying to speak to his dead daughter's ghost. But he's entered into this ritual without seeming to understand that it's set in an erotic context. It's almost astonishing how blind he is to the incredibly masochistic nature of this. He's not simply coping with the sense of her loss; he's also coping with a sense of his own guilt about how he's sexualized her image.