More so than even David Cronenberg, Egoyan is a filmmaker only Canada could create. Whereas Cronenberg, whom he considers a mentor, could have pursued a career in Hollywood but chose not to, Egoyan could only be a Canadian filmmaker. Unlike the rebarbative images of Cronenberg, Egoyan’s films push at a distant part of the cultural envelope, telling us things we didn’t know we didn’t want to see or hear. The intention is every bit as transgressive; it’s just subtler.
Ironically, this inaccessibility makes him eminently acceptable as a cultural ambassador for Canada — safe because the complexity of his films makes him easier to ignore here in his home and adopted land. Born in Cairo in 1960, he emigrated with his Armenian parents in 1963. His life and art have been shaped by the cultural bureaucracy that supported his formative years; his first five films were conceived as arts council projects. “It’s a holdover,” he admits. “When you apply, you have to describe the conceptual idea behind the work you’re doing. I was schooled in that, in being able to defend ideas, to talk about textures and structural strategies.”
Egoyan’s worlds feature neutral “Canadian” surfaces that conceal unfathomable complexity, ordinary people who betray extraordinary impulses. He loves baggage, the stuff we drag around with us that isn’t apparent until we either divulge it or it spills out despite our intentions. His first feature, Next of Kin, begins with the main character as literal baggage, the camera following him as he rides along an airport conveyor belt toward the luggage carousel.
Among his favourite moments in his films, he says, “are these simple scenes between two people where they don’t necessarily understand the agenda of the other person but there is something drawing them toward that. I love deciphering what someone is carrying, and the essential mystery of any meeting between two people where they have to negotiate that.” Whereas Cronenberg tends toward entertainments in the Graham Greene sense, Egoyan’s films are first and foremost intellectual. Even his perceived failures are never less than interesting. When he attempted genre with Where the Truth Lies, his critical pals abandoned him, but the audacity of his casting was breathtaking in its perversity.
Normally, a film is cast according to the exigencies of the story. A flashback to a character’s childhood requires a child actor. But Egoyan chose his actress, Alison Lohman, because she could convincingly play herself as an adult and as a little girl. Of all the shortcomings for which the film was pilloried, Lohman’s performance predominates. “It was the right decision, but I understand, in terms of that film generating the support it needed commercially, it was wrongheaded.” But, he adds, “it was an intellectual decision.”
Similarly, Ararat was deemed a lesser work because of its perceived moral relativism. “That again put me into a philosophical argument between certain thinkers who were decrying what in our culture has become most symptomatic of a certain laziness, which is the ability to always see both sides of a story,” he says. “I had to say that was not what I was doing, that ultimately the film was constructed to speak to the way trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next.”
As a rebuttal, in 2003 he presented a lecture at his alma mater, the University of Toronto, that was later published in the University of Toronto Quarterly under the title “In Other Words: Poetic Licence and the Incarnation of History.” He wrote: “There are those who feel I should have told the story more simply, focused on setting the record straight. But I never saw this as my cinematic responsibility.” This was the act of a true public intellectual. Rather than retreat or ignore, Egoyan added something new to the discourse. No doubt this sensibility was central to the Dan David selectors. Says Egoyan, “The first few days in Tel Aviv were about seminars and engaging with an audience that had curiously absorbed a film as their own, even though it’s not. It’s interesting how few films about the Holocaust deal with this notion of the transmission of trauma, and how it’s possible as a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor to be still living with that.”
Atom Egoyan is very good at talking about his work, but his talk puts a neutral face on what he commits to posterity: incest in The Sweet Hereafter, pedophilia in Exotica, genocide in Ararat, and, in Adoration, the true nature of the war against terror.
Adoration is a classic set-up, a series of intellectual mousetraps. As is his forte, he uses our society’s obsession with communication technology as the wedge that drives his characters apart; media isolates us even as it connects us. And he uses and abuses narrative conventions to tell us one thing while actually telling us something else.
A teenage boy, Simon, has a school project, a translation exercise. Encouraged by his teacher, he takes a French news story about an Arab man who married a Western woman, impregnated her, and then put her on a plane to Israel. The woman is stopped by Israeli security before boarding. Inside her luggage is a bomb. The boy makes the story his own, much to the consternation of his uncle, who is raising him. Simon’s own father was an Arab and his mother a beautiful blonde, and his father killed his mother.
