Exotica

Very little is as it seems in the uncompromising world of Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Exotica, which won the critics' prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, may be Egoyan's most accessible and internationally popular film. Exotica is the most seductively engaging of all Egoyan's films (Calendar, The Adjuster, Speaking Parts, Family Viewing), whose signature themes always revolve around broad, ontological issues of how we know what we know and how we connect with other beings. Set in the milieu of an upscale strip club called Exotica, it is replete with tantalizing lap dancers and abundantly florid tropical decor. Egoyan lays the groundwork for our anticipation of an exotic and sexy romp. Then, true to form, Egoyan turns this world inside out: The sexy becomes creepy, the fantasy becomes pathological, the exotic becomes prosaic, and voyeurism bleeds over into participation. Here are a few of the elements: a lap dancer who dresses like a schoolgirl and performs to Leonard Cohen's “Everybody Knows” (Exotica gets my vote for best use of a Leonard Cohen song in a movie); a deejay whose patter goes from provocative to pustulant; a pregnant owner of the club (played by Egoyan's longtime collaborator and wife Arsinee Khanjian) who has made a prior arrangement with the deejay to impregnate her; a tax inspector who visits Exotica nightly for his ritual table dance from the “schoolgirl”; an egg-smuggling, exotic petshop owner (don't ask) who ritualistically picks up male sex partners at the opera; a girl who regularly babysits for a child who isn't there. Eventually, their lives and obsessions all intertwine and make sense, and those interconnections chart the development of the movie. All these characters are really “other” than what they seem to be, and, certainly, something other than what we are first led to believe they are. In that sense, the movie almost functions like one long striptease in which the characters and the plot are slowly revealed to the viewer. What these revelations all amount to, finally, is less than meets the eye and, ultimately, all we take away from the movie is a heightened wariness of perception. And that's not a bad haul in the general scheme of things, but it may not be enough to make up for the overall discomfort generated by the movie's storyline. Egoyan's greatest strength as a filmmaker may be his ability to create and sustain particular moods and atmospheres. In that sense, Exotica lives up to its name.