Exotica

Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994) [8]
On my Netflix review of this here, I said I found this film intriguing but panned it because I thought the dialogue was too philosophical and disjointed. Well, I was wrong. Dead wrong. I don’t know what it was about my first viewing (I saw it in Sicinski’s “Gaze Reconsidered” class, he wasn’t there, and I was probably thinking about sneaking out after the film was over.) but I finally got the point this time. The way Egoyan takes his time to unwind the full details of the story and to explain how the characters are all intertwined in some sort is fantastic. This creates an intricate web that allows the true nature of each character to be revealed. I’m still not sure how Freud’s concept of the gaze can really be applied to this film, but I think it has more to do with the audience’s gaze towards the film and not so much about that a lot of the film takes place in a strip club. The dialogue makes more sense in terms of how the characters interact with each other throughout, and that the nature of it is pretty much consistent throughout. I still have a little issue with the dialogue between the Sarah Polley character and the Bruce Greenwood character. But that dialogue does create a feeling that we, as the audience, are gazing and hearing some pretty heavy, personal stuff that we really shouldn’t be privy to.