Atom Egoyan’s early work was a regular fixture on SBS Saturday Cult Movie night and him, alongside Hal Hartley, defined a certain indie cinema aesthetic pre-Tarantino. I remember Egoyan’s break-out arthouse hit Exotica (1994) being advertised as an erotic thriller, posters and video boxes using the imagery of Mia Kirshner’s character dancing in a school girl’s outfit in a strip club as if it was comparable to the post-Basic Instinct terrain of Jade or Showgirls. Finally sitting down to watch it after being recommended it by several friends, the film itself is not really sleazy – its eroticism feels very cold, distanced and runs throughout its ornate aesthetic and puzzle-piece plotting. Exotica is almost a chamber drama, focusing on a group of key characters and slowly unveiling information about them, asking us to shift perspectives and assumptions: from the haunted accountant (Bruce Greenwood) who frequents the strip club Exotica, the young dancer (Kirshner) who counts him as a regular, the pretentious club DJ (Elias Koteas in peak Koteas form) and announcer, and a nervous pet store owner (Don McKellar) who finds flirtation and more by offering free opera tickets to scalpers outside. Using occasional flashbacks and a slowly fed backstory, the overall theme is more about trauma and transaction, the way money is used to pay for services (and emotional or physical intimacy) or denies them, and the different roles played by people depending on another’s point of view. Even when mostly all is revealed, the final sequence raises more questions and things to contemplate in a masterfully oblique way. All the performers are great, particularly from Egoyan’s regulars like Greenwood, Koteas, McKellar, Egoyan’s wife Arsinee Khanjian, a young Sarah Polley, and Victor Garber. It has its own peculiar, strange tone, which feels both stylishly heightened and mundanely detached, typified by the way Kirshner’s dance routine to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’ is performed and filmed. Viewed on the Criterion Channel. Recommended.
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