Exotica
(Atom Egoyan, 1994)
3 ½ stars
Atom Egoyan’s "The Sweet Hereafter" was an emotional experience too incredible for words, a tidal wave of grief, pain, emptiness and peace that hit me so hard that I couldn’t think about anything else for almost a week. (What made it even more amazing was that Egoyan never manipulated, sermonized or spelled anything out.) I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s one of the twenty best movies that I’ve ever seen.
After watching something that powerful, it’s only natural that “Exotica” (the movie Egoyan made immediately before “The Sweet Hereafter”) would feel a little tame, almost like a warm-up: Like “Hereafter,” “Exotica” stars Bruce Greenwood, Sarah Polley and Arsinée Khanjian; tells its story out of order; and focuses on how people react when they loose loved ones. But with its toned down themes and smaller scale, it feels … well, like something Egoyan only made because he wanted to feel out his targets with small arms before breaking out the chain guns and rocket launchers three years later.
The movie is about the intersected lives of four (apparent) strangers: an IRS agent; a gay pet shop owner; a stripper and the strip-club DJ. (Don’t roll your eyes; Egoyan made this movie long before Paul Haggis and Alejandro González Iñárritu turned these movies into clichés.) At the beginning of the movie, these people seem almost completely unrelated; they cross paths occasionally (the IRS agent is auditing the pet shop owner and visiting the strip club), but that’s it. But soon they start bumping into each other more and more often, opening old wounds and revealing dark secrets, until the end of the movie, when we realize just how closely these “strangers” are connected.
And the more we learn, the more we realize that they’re too complex to be written off as easily as we assumed at first. Take the IRS man: He goes to the Exotica club almost every other night to see the same stripper. Is he a dirty pervert? No. He lost his wife and daughter several years ago; sex means nothing to him. Does he go because he’s so empty inside that he needs strippers to touch him just so he can feel alive?
Have I said too much? I’ve barely said anything. Every character in this movie has a secret and over the course of “Exotica’s” 100 minutes, we hear them all. In the process, the movie touches on deep-rooted feelings of grief, loneliness and emptiness that we’ve all felt at one point in our lives. “There's this feeling I get sometimes that I wasn’t meant to be satisfied,” the DJ tells his girlfriend in a flashback. “It seems to me that every time I'm about to get a hold of something or someone, they just seem to slip away.” (And because the movie is told out of order, we know the second he opens his mouth that this girl will also slip through his fingers, which makes his sad story even sadder.)
The movie isn’t perfect: Some of Egoyan’s time-jumbling confused me, the big revelations didn’t hit me as hard as they should have and … oh hell, I’m only complaining because I stupidly expected it to live up to “The Sweet Hereafter,” a movie so perfect that it didn’t have a single wrong shot. (Why haven’t you seen it yet?) If I had watched it without any preconceived expectations, I probably would have loved it more.
But I don’t want to end this review on a bad note, so let me shift gears and talk about what “Exotica” does perfectly: develop a relationship between grief and sex so real that it completely changed my perceptions of why people go to strip-clubs. I always thought that people went to strip clubs because they were skeevy bastards who didn’t respect women, or because they needed a quick “fix.” After watching this movie, I wondered: Do people go because they have emotional holes that they want – expect – strippers to fill? No wonder the dancing feels so sad.
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