Of course, you have to take my word for it. These are the connections I made, the conclusions I drew: this viewer’s responsibility. This is Egoyan the unsettler, the creator who draws out of the viewer the inner racist, the inner psychotic. He lays bait for the demons within us. Using our unconscious knowledge of film grammar, Egoyan lures us into assumptions: the beautiful Western woman is sad because she feels the Arab doesn’t love her. The Arab is untroubled by her sadness because he is sending her to her doom.
And yet the entire sequence is a fabrication, an imaginary flashback. The images are Simon’s internal projections from his mother’s last days on earth. But Egoyan hasn’t shown us her last days on earth. Merrily making connections and predictions, I wandered into his snare. When the truth is revealed, Simon’s projections take on an entirely different meaning. Nothing has actually been said in the scenes between the two actors that wouldn’t have been said in the context of two lovers parting. It’s simply the power of filmic suggestion combined with my undeniable bias toward beautiful blondes and against barbarous Arabs.
Egoyan is using film against me, against us. The always-in-touch modern world gives us a false sense of knowing what’s going on around us. The slender slices of “reality” delivered by the news media create a simulacrum of the world, which each of us then distorts into our own projection.
The irony is Egoyan shows us this in Adoration — in the guise of an Internet video forum in which Simon shares his appropriated history — and you don’t notice you are participating. Simon’s video screen is divided into increasingly smaller screens, each with a person who is interpreting and refining or regurgitating a new version of Simon’s “truth.” And, sitting in the cinema, we unwittingly do the same.
Never mind the intricate plotting; never mind the dialogue that says one thing but suggests something else; never mind the acting, which would be infuriatingly stylized in any other film. What Egoyan achieves in Adoration is a gift to the viewer: a mind tremor. You can walk away from this film feeling many things, but what stays with you is the intimation that you don’t know yourself as well as you think.
Egoyan is nodding his head. Mentally, he’s back in the safe room. He’s talking about the challenge and privilege of remounting Beckett’s Eh Joe.
Written for television in 1965, Eh Joe involves one actor sitting listening and reacting to a woman’s voice — “each sentence a knife going in,” directed Beckett — while the camera slowly dollies forward. With no one to speak to, Joe’s face mutely addresses the emptiness before him and thence expresses the emptiness within. It’s considered one of the most difficult performances an actor can undertake. It was Egoyan’s idea to adapt this teleplay for the stage. And it was his triumph to convince Michael Gambon to take the role.
“This is what amazes me about the point I’ve reached in my career,” Egoyan says. “I was a theatre geek in high school. I loved Beckett, Pinter, Genet, all these absurdist writers, Ionesco, moulded with my love of Monty Python. There was something about harnessing lunacy with despair that I found seductive and attractive.”
He credits the late Richard Bradshaw,artistic director of the Canadian Opera Company (“God rest his soul”) for wondering if the Atom Egoyan who directed Exotica could do something new with Salome. “Being plugged back into theatre has been so amazing to me. To do these operas, to do these plays, but to do them with a sense of what they have meant to me as a filmmaker or a visual artist, has been really gratifying.”
The reel-to-reel in Krapp’s Last Tape, the video camera in Family Viewing, the television watching of Felicia’s Journey, the videophone and Internet chat groups of Adoration: Egoyan’s obsessions are the reasons he is the ideal interpreter of Beckett’s own forays into other forms. Eh Joe has everything Egoyan the theatre nerd turned filmmaker turned theatre nerd could wish for. Onstage, on a simple set, Gambon is sitting in profile on a bed. But his face, captured by a camera offstage, is projected onto a scrim stretched before him. The audience gets a double dose of turmoil: Joe’s body and his face.
