London FIlm Fest Day 9 - CHLOE

Atom Egoyan's latest film, CHLOE, treads familiar territory - sexual jealousy, paranoia and the transgressive desires that rock mainstream marriages. Julianne Moore plays a successful gynecologist (of course!) who suspects her flirtatious husband (Liam Neeson) of cheating. As in the laughably dissimilar EXTRACT, she tests him by setting him with a beautiful young prostitute (Amanda Seyfried evidently trying to shake off that MAMMA MIA! wholesomeness). In contrast to the more simplistic French source film, NATALIE, Egoyan and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (SECRETARY) keep us guessing as to whether the husband is really cheating, or whether he is the victim of his wife's insecurity. We also have a classic Egoyan relationship between the wife and the prostitute: is the wife really falling for the hooker, or is she just trying to get close to her husband in a really fracked up way? And is the hooker really falling for the wife, or is she just being emotionally or indeed financially manipulative?

I really loved this film. Moore gives a strong central performance as a woman d'un certain age in a crisis, and Seyfried is convincing both as seductress and vulnerable young girl. They sell their relationship, and that makes the film. I also love the very particular production design from Phillip Barker, and the locations chosen - in particular the marital home. The wife is, by virtue of architecture mirroring her psyche, a voyeur, condemned to look through picture windows and listen at doors and stare at reflections. It works wonderfully.

CHLOE played Toronto 2009 and will be released in France in March 2010.

London Film Festival Day 6 - ADORATION

Atom Egoyan's new film ADORATION, is good enough to be considered with the best of his work - THE SWEET HEREAFTER and ARARAT. It's a sophisticated, emotionally resonant drama about clingng to grief and the slippery nature of memory - themes explored in other Egoyan films. The movie is well-acted, beautifully scored and cleverly put together. The heart of the film is a Lebanese schoolteacher called Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) who befriends an orphaned schoolboy called Simon (Devon Bostick). She encourages him to develop a dramatic monologue in which he imagines that his father was a terrorist who had planted a bomb on his wife, then pregnant with Simon. If she hadn't been interecepted by security, Simon, his mother and 400 passengers would have died. Simon - precociously calm and articulate - becomes engrossed in this alternative history to the point where he insists on pretending that it's true to his schoolfriends and the wider internet chatroom community. It is hinted that he gets off on the audience reaction and his newfound local notoriety. It is, after all, more satisfying to control a story than to have to piece together fragments of your parents fateful car crash and your grandfather's racist attitude toward your father. At the same time, Sabine tries to reach out to Simon's uncle, Tom. He's an insular man who tries to avoid confrontation, in sharp contrast to Simon's father who tackled his father-in-law head-on. Tom is the opposite of Simon, refusing to even try to make sense of past events, avoiding emotional or intellectual engagement with reality until Sabine literally forces herself into his life. I was suprised to find that underneath the beard, the actor playing Tom was Scott Speedman - the guy from the UNDERWORLD movies. It seems that with the right material he is a talented actor. The movie progresses by small reveals and small obfuscations in that typical Egoyan way. But slowly we follow the characters uncovering the truth of Simon's parents relationship and the events leading up to their death. More importantly we see three characters who begin the movie in a state of arrested mourning move toward some sort of peace, if not quite normality. 

ADORATION played Cannes, Toronto, and London 2008. It opens in France on January 7th and in South Africa on February 13th.

CITADEL - Less of a review than an advisery note

CITADEL is a sort of home-video shot by the acclaimed indie director Atom Egoyan. It documents his visit to Beirut, Lebanon - the city where his wife Arsinée Khanjian grew up. They return after 28 years and the intervening civil war, along with their ten-year old son, to visit family and see what has happened to the city. The resulting documentary is full of funny little asides about the family but also a lot of insight to the current political situation in Lebanon. For instance, as Egoyan walks down the main street in the Shi-ite west Beirut we see large posters dangling from the lamp-posts. Each one shows the face of a different "martyr"/suicide bomber. This prompts an interesting discussion about how muslims view photography within the panolpy of the arts - how far photographers are creating an image or just "capturing light". The documentary is by turns funny and by turns grim - but always fascinating and I would heartily recommend it for its content. However, I do have to add a sort of health warning. The movie is shot on a tiny little hand-held Mini DV camera. There is no professional lighting or formal "set-up". After all, the movie just started out, literally, as a home-video and was never really intended to bear the scrutiny of a theatre audience. As a result, the footage is really jumpy and if you, like me, suffer from motion sickness, it can be pretty hard to watch. Indeed, I came out with a terrible head-ache.

CITADEL is, as far as I can tell, being shown at the odd festival or arts cinema here and there. It's definitely one to look out for.

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES - sleazy thriller, no more, no less

Expectations run high for WHERE THE TRUTH LIES. It is directed by that darling of the Indie scene, Atom Egoyan and stars Colin Firth (the original and best Mr. Darcy) and Kevin Bacon, who dazzled me with his sympathetic portrayal of a paedophile in THE WOODSMAN last year. In addition, the love interest is "rising star" Alison Lohman, last seen with Nic Cage in MATCHSTICK MEN. Not only are the cast and crew high quality but the director's aim is grand. Atom Egoyan has attempted to create an old fashioned film noir - those wonderful 1940s movies that were intricately plotted movies with tough guys, wicked women, murders, incest, theft and glamour. Re-creating that kind of ethereal, dangerous mood is difficult in these days of colour film and special effects but a few movies have pulled it off with great success, not least the superb L.A CONFIDENTIAL. WHERE THE TRUTH LIES is nowhere near as successful but neither is it a bad film.

The plot centres around a 1950s comedy double-act in the style of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Colin Firth plays the straight man and Kevin Bacon his comedy stooge. They live the "Frat pack" lifestyle to the max - hot chicks, fast cars, alcohol, hotel rooms. However, when an actress is found dead in their bath-tub it all goes wrong. Fast forward to the 1970s when a young ambitious reporter tries to unravel the hushed-up scandal.

The plot synopsis makes the movie sound a lot more interesting than it really is. At heart, it is just another sleazy erotic thriller. There is nothing wrong with that but it seems a bit of a waste of effort for Egoyan and his cast to come up with something so one-dimensional. Sad to say that in years to come, if this movie is remembered at all, it will be as a footnote in film school text books on censorship. Thanks to a menage a trois between Colin Firth, Kevin Bacon and Rachel Blanchard, featuring lots of "thrusting" the movie received the rarely used NC 17 rating in the US, limiting its ability to earn back its budget.
WHERE THE TRUTH LIES is already on limited release in the US and the UK. It goes on release in France on the 21st December 2005 and in Germany on the 2nd February 2006.