***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Mark O’Brien
written and directed by Atom Egoyan
by Angelo Muredda Atom Egoyan hits his stride again in Seven Veils, a playful and self-reflexive backstage drama about the re-staging of a Canadian Opera Company production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, which Egoyan, lover of complicated matryoshka-doll narrative structures and intertextuality, has twice mounted for the same company, first in 1996, then in February of this year. Footage from both of those versions becomes the obscure scene of the crime in the film, where director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried, reuniting with Egoyan after the underrated Chloe) is in the challenging process of remounting a production previously directed by her mentor and apparent groomer Charles, who integrated cryptic home movies of her ritualistic abuse at the hands of her father into the original work–video elements that, of course, were also foregrounded in Egoyan’s stagings of the opera. While Jeanine is wrestling personal and professional demons to get the remounting into shape and dealing with her conservative minders at the COC, who’d rather she discard her aesthetic changes and relegate her incendiary director’s note to a blog or a podcast (where, you can almost hear Egoyan snickering, it’ll never be heard), props master Clea (Rebecca Liddiard) is documenting her behind-the-scenes work on her humble iPhone, inadvertently capturing another sex crime that makes her both a survivor and a potential power player.
Egoyan’s penchant for overripe formal and thematic complications can lead him askew, but his fussiness suits this project about the numerous competing personal, aesthetic, and business interests that go into putting on a show, particularly an adaptation with this long and this knotted a history. The prologue, which sees Jeanine skulking around the empty Four Seasons Centre, surveying the theatre from a liminal bridge between the audience and the stage as her mentor used to do, smartly sets up the competing perspectives Jeanine will be caught between in putting a personal stamp on Charles’s work. Seyfried is a funny and enigmatic authorial surrogate who reads at once as seasoned and as trapped in the arrested development of stepping into Charles’s (and Strauss’s, and Oscar Wilde’s) shoes. That comes through beautifully in her line delivery when she tells the overly familiar podcaster, Charlie (Joey Klein, channelling the off-kilter, vaguely hostile energy of Don McKellar), whose name recalls her mentor’s, “I’m probably older than I look.” Apart from improbably standing in for Egoyan, she’s a decently fleshed-out character in her own right, buckling under the pressure of mounting a problematic text–“Maybe we should get the intimacy coordinator,” a handler suggests when Jeanine’s direction of a depiction of oral sex gets a touch too florid–that triggers and exacerbates her sexual trauma.
Her psychodrama makes for enjoyably heady stuff. Jeanine’s directorial revisions, which she tries and fails to articulate to her performers amidst an orchestra rehearsal in one unnerving scene, lightly interrogate the sexual politics of Egoyan’s previous interpretation of the text–albeit while recycling the incest tropes that snake through his work–through the lens of a survivor who is also a creator, a dynamic mirrored in the backstage intrigue involving the props master and the opera’s boorish male lead (Michael Kupfer-Radecky). That the dialogue, the traumatic home videos that act as flashbacks, and, in some cases, the performances themselves are stilted and strange in the signature Egoyan style feels like a feature, not a bug. Here at last is his own unabridged director’s note: no need to wait for the podcast. Programme: Special Presentations
