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Exotica
Book by Egoyan, Atom, Pevere, Geoff
158 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 22, 2023
"WE'RE HERE TO ENTERTAIN, NOT TO HEAL"
~20% Introductory essay by Geoff Pevere
~20% Atom Egoyan interviewed by Geoff Pevere
~60% Screenplay: mainly dialogues, few clues about the plot and location, hardly about the camera
The essay gives an overall overview of Egoyan's work, recurring ideas and attempts to tie the films to Egoyan's personality and life story and "the traditional paths of Canadian self doubt" (18). Exotica appears in the essay, but not really prominently.
"media become environment [...] People watching screens, monitors, photographs, mirrors and [...] their own flesh" (17)
"Egoyan's characters are caught transfixed by images [...] in Egoyan's world, mediated images represent the limits of experience [...] redemptive power of human intimacy is the only refuge from mediated experience..." (36), "Egoyan's films [...] want to keep us from wholesale immersion in the fiction, as they regard that desire for immersion as tragic." (37), "...entertainment is [...] what keeps us apart." (40)
"...make an audience question their own reasons for watching it." (16)
"'Have you noticed,' a character in Exotica asks in a moment that offers a key to the entirety of Egoyan's work, 'that the things you want are the things that slip away?'" (23)
"In Exotica [...] the only coherent point of view is in fact the film's and not the characters." (40)
...
In the interview one learns that the emotional terrain of Exotica is probably Egoyan's confusing sex experience as an adolescent with a girl who was once abused he didn't know about:
"There was a tremendous loneliness in the process of sexual communion. [...] this film, more than any other, was an attempt to work out the charade of sexuality and the possibility of creating a sexual environment in which the relationships were quite platonic." (48)
"...what a writer does. That's not what I do. I'm a strategist. [...] What a director or a strategist likes to do is organise scenes and environments and people in a peculiar way or particular manner to communicate an idea." (47)
A few statements e.g. by his cinematographer Paul Sarossy would not have hurt, because the book contains almost nothing about the camera and the great light work, although they were important for the film in my opinion.
~20% Introductory essay by Geoff Pevere
~20% Atom Egoyan interviewed by Geoff Pevere
~60% Screenplay: mainly dialogues, few clues about the plot and location, hardly about the camera
The essay gives an overall overview of Egoyan's work, recurring ideas and attempts to tie the films to Egoyan's personality and life story and "the traditional paths of Canadian self doubt" (18). Exotica appears in the essay, but not really prominently.
"media become environment [...] People watching screens, monitors, photographs, mirrors and [...] their own flesh" (17)
"Egoyan's characters are caught transfixed by images [...] in Egoyan's world, mediated images represent the limits of experience [...] redemptive power of human intimacy is the only refuge from mediated experience..." (36), "Egoyan's films [...] want to keep us from wholesale immersion in the fiction, as they regard that desire for immersion as tragic." (37), "...entertainment is [...] what keeps us apart." (40)
"...make an audience question their own reasons for watching it." (16)
"'Have you noticed,' a character in Exotica asks in a moment that offers a key to the entirety of Egoyan's work, 'that the things you want are the things that slip away?'" (23)
"In Exotica [...] the only coherent point of view is in fact the film's and not the characters." (40)
...
In the interview one learns that the emotional terrain of Exotica is probably Egoyan's confusing sex experience as an adolescent with a girl who was once abused he didn't know about:
"There was a tremendous loneliness in the process of sexual communion. [...] this film, more than any other, was an attempt to work out the charade of sexuality and the possibility of creating a sexual environment in which the relationships were quite platonic." (48)
"...what a writer does. That's not what I do. I'm a strategist. [...] What a director or a strategist likes to do is organise scenes and environments and people in a peculiar way or particular manner to communicate an idea." (47)
A few statements e.g. by his cinematographer Paul Sarossy would not have hurt, because the book contains almost nothing about the camera and the great light work, although they were important for the film in my opinion.
October 9, 2014
Great, underrated movie. It may be Egoyan's best and better than The Sweet Hereafter.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews