erdmannmartin
Exotica is Egoyan's best movie and the best movie I've ever seen.Exotica raises the question of our existence, what we are supposed to do on Earth as humans. And this as a subtext in a perfect narration of people whose paths come together in the "Exotica".There is no other film that contains such poetic but accurate dialogues. In this artwork, every spoken word has a meaning in relation to the meta-narrative.The very good work with the music motifs and the location, merged with the film dialogues, give the film an atmosphere that is neither sad nor happy, but exceptionally gorgeous and yet earthly.I'm very thankful to see this wise movie.
Platypuschow
With a cast of familiar faces this thriller/drama goes nowhere fast in fact I'm not sure it goes anywhere at all. Lifeless, dull, ridiculously ungripping and considering half the film is set in a strip joint not even visually appealing! The last time I was this bored watching a film it was the critically acclaimed Inception (2010) the film that bred a new type of pseudo intellectual movie fan with the moniker of "If you don't like it you didn't understand it" Well I understood that over-convoluted mess and I still didn't like it.Exotica brings nothing to the table, not even a young Mia Kirchner stripping in a school girl outfit could turn this embarrassment around.
christopher-underwood
Returning to this film after a gap of many years, I find it just as stunning as I remember, even if I remember very few of the scenes. Of course I did remember Mia Kirshner's schoolgirl strip to Leonard Cohen! The film is particularly effective and affecting because the characters are so well portrayed that they seem to be unravelling exactly what is going on the same as we are. I understand that Egoyan dislikes audition for his actors, preferring to select them on past work (preferably theatre work) and then presenting them with the part. In that way they take ownership of the character and we get to experience a very emotional tale. A list of the more difficult themes in which this film engages would put off many and that the main location is a posh strip club might seem an obstacle for many. Nevertheless this is an important, beautifully shot film in which seemingly minor moments turn out to have great significance, first for one and then another. Mesmerising with perfect direction, camera work, acting and music. I cannot praise this work of art more highly.
tieman64
This is a review of "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Exotica", two films by Atom Egoyan, both of which deal with tragedy and loss and both of which feature the same actors in similar roles.Like most of his films, Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter" is structured as a jigsaw possible assembled around a single traumatic event. As the film unfolds, and the cast's relationship to the central event grows in clarity, some moment of revelation is achieved. Virtually all of Egoyan's films adopt this narrative structure, which seems to blend a modernist search for truth with a decidedly postmodern admittance that truth requires the careful sorting of both vantage points and testimonials.The traumatic event in this case is an accident involving a school bus. The bus skids off a road and veers onto a frozen lake. The ice breaks, the bus sinks and 14 children die. Of course, everyone in the town then suffers the knock-on effect of this accident.Man, you might say, is a creature constantly in search of meaning (the brain itself is a pattern recognition machine). He creates myths, patterns and rhymes, trying desperately to assert some measure of order. He cannot accept the chaotic cruelty of the universe, preferring instead to create comfortable rituals and routines in the hope of insulating himself from pain.When the unexpected does occur, man lifts his head and cries "Why?". But God never answers. Into this vacuum steps Ian Holm, who in "The Sweet Hereafter" plays a lawyer trying desperately to assign meaning to the film's central bus crash. He wants the parents of the dead children to band together and file a law suit. A law suit against who? The guilty bus driver? Nope, the driver is broke. He wants to go after the company that made the bus. He wants to sue them for millions. It is their fault. Alone.At first Ian Holm comes across as a greedy pig. Here is a man milking suffering for money. But gradually we learn that he is himself a man intimately familiar with loss. His life has been one of misery, and the film is peppered with flashbacks detailing his relationship with his daughter, a drug addict who is dying of AIDS. Like the parents whom he hopes to represent, this lawyer is looking for the meaning of his own suffering. "Why me?" he cries. Lashing out against others and assigning blame is the only way he can rationalise things.Similarly, the small town in which the accident occurs seems at first to be a picturesque postcard village. But gradually this image is shattered, as promiscuity, infidelity, alcoholism and sexual abuse all raise their heads. Director Atom Egoyan, an outspoken fan of "The Shining", even uses the famous "Horse and Train" picture from Kubrick's film, a recognition that both films deal subliminally with the same buried, almost invisible horrors.On top of all this, Egoyan adds a layer of myth. He has one of the film's children narrate Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". In a self referential moment, the child asks "Who took the children? Who was the piper? Why did the fabled portal in the mountain (the breaking ice) open up and swallow the kids?"In this way, Egoyan approaches his central the tragedy from at least 3 angles. Firstly, as a fateful moment of chance, secondly, as a mythical act of God (God smites the parent's for their sins) and thirdly as an event exploited by a vengeful pilgrim of pain. All three approaches seek to lay blame, targeting either the failures of parents, the actions of a punishing god or the laws of a wholly arbitrary cosmos."The Sweet Hereafter" is a very hopeless film, man never able to grasp absolute clarity (which of my behaviours, if any, caused this?). But there's also something very hopeful about Egoyan's ending. The sweet hereafter of the title is that zone of wisdom (found by the child who narrates the Piped Piper) where we ultimately come to accept the unacceptable and go on living.Similar in structure, Egoyan's "Exotica" approaches the same themes from a different angle. A man (Francis) loses his wife and daughter in a car crash. To cope with the pain he hires a young girl to come over to his house every day and babysit the daughter he lost. This babysitter simply plays a piano and lurks about his empty house, after which the bereaved father drives her home and pays her for babysitting nothingness. This ritual helps Francis assuage his pain. Every night Francis also visits a strip-club called "Exotica". There he watches a young woman (Christina), dressed in a schoolgirl's outfit, strip. But their relationship is an odd one. They seem to have a strange history. When she dances for him, it has nothing to do with sex and more to do with longing and loss. Of course both Francis and the stripper have a secret which is incrementally revealed, the truth peeled back like a stripper's clothes, leading to that revelatory final payoff that is typical of Egoyan's work. I won't spoil that moment. Suffice to say that this movie takes us into fairly interesting places. For Egoyan, man seems to live a life of cyclical substitution (we grow or are pushed out of everything and are forced to find substitutes). It's a bleak film, but unlike the work of Sam Mendes, to whom Egoyan is often wrongly compared, Egoyan eschews easy sensationalism and carnival freak-shows. 8.5/10 - Worth two viewings.
