Atom Egoyan: Adoration (2008)

Simon is a teenager who lost his parents eight years earlier, in a car crash. The cause of the accident was trivial; the father had been blinded by a van coming from the opposite direction and had lost control of the wheel.

The maternal grandfather keeps on telling Simon that it was a crime; the father killed himself and his wife. There is no evidence for this; it doesn't matter: the father was an Arab, a Muslim; for the grandfather any Muslim is an Islamo-Fascist, a born suicide bomber.

Simon is at the age where understanding your identity is vital, and a missing father is an important piece in the puzzle.

A missing father cannot be an ordinary man dying for trivial reasons: Simon is more and more tempted to attribute to his father an exceptional destiny. As an Arab, wasn't he a fighter for some Arab cause?

There is a drama teacher at school, who encourages Simon to follow his imagination and to write about his father.

This way the story starts to grow, and Simon puts it very soon on the web: the father was part of a terrorist network and was planning to take his wife (who was pregnant with Simon) on a trip to Israel, to blow up the plane, killing himself, his pregnant wife, and all passengers. For unclear reasons he had sent the wife with another plane, and he killed her many years later in the car crash.

Well, the story is obviously fake, against any logic. It doesn't matter: everybody start to discuss on the web whether the father was a terrorist or a revolutionary hero. The number of people debating this issue is growing exponentially; soon Holocaust survivors and Holocaust deniers come in. Nobody is considering the basic question: where is the logic in this story?

The teacher understands at a certain point that the whole story has gone too far. The grandfather is biased by his racism, the teacher is not innocent either: she had been the first wife of the father, an Arab like him, interested in developing a Muslim identity in the boy.

It is only Simon who realizes that he has become the prisoner of his own imagination. And he decides to burn all memories, everything that remained from his parents: it is his identity, not theirs, and it has to be started from zero.

This is the story; actually this is the hidden story: the movie (Adoration, made by Atom Egoyan in 2008) carries actually two nested stories. What we follow on the screen is the other one: the effort to realize what's going on, the impossibility to find it, as anyone is interested only in keeping the own biases.

Kiarostami comes here to mind: like in his movies, it is us, the attendance, who are invited to explore the facts, to separate real and imaginary and to find the truth. Could we say that Egoyan and Kiarostami make interactive movies? Maybe.






(Atom Egoyan)

Atom Egoyan

Atom Egoyan: his work often explores themes of alienation and isolation, featuring characters whose interactions are mediated through technology, bureaucracy or other power structures; stylistically, his films often follow non-linear plot-structures, in which events are placed out of sequence in order to elicit specific emotional reactions from the audience by withholding key information (Wikipedia).

Individually, each of his films look to be as far removed from typical movie formula as Toronto, his home base, is removed geographically from Hollywood; unique in character, content, and especially structure, an Egoyan film can easily put off the most practiced moviegoer; to those who find his approach refreshing, Atom's films provide a puzzle containing logical clues into seemingly inscrutable behavior; the process of discovery involved in watching these films is an engaging alternative to standard movie entertainment; examined collectively, Egoyan's work isn't simply that of a renegade, out to break with convention simply to be different; his films necessarily reflect life through the very real experiences of their maker; Atom Egoyan's body of work is that of a true auteur, dedicated to using the language of film to explore his own artistic vision (The Egoyan Nucleus).

For me Egoyan is still a challenge, among all difficult directors of today (Hou, Kiarostami, Almodovar, von Trier, Jarmusch, van Sant, Wong, to name just a few): and I want to comment here some of his movies, to explore them this way, to understand his approach. From what I've watched so far, it seems to me that Egoyan is the opposite of Minimalists (which I'm probably much more used to); his is rather a Baroque architect of Borgesian amplitude.

• Adoration

(Filmofilia)