Exotica
The saddest parts of Exotica–Atom Egoyan’s lush and affecting sixth feature, a movie inflected like its predecessors by obsessive sexual rituals and desperate familial longings–are moments when money awkwardly changes hands. This film is every bit as allegorical as his Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, and Calendar–and every bit as concerned with a need for family surrogates as Next of Kin and Family Viewing–but it is only incidentally a movie about capitalism and its ability to pervert personal relationships. It does involve voyeurism, corruption, and a form of prostitution; all these things are conventionally associated with capitalism, but they’ve been around much longer.
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But appearances are illusory. Eric is stationed immediately outside a curious space, hidden by the decor, where the true boss of the establishment, a pregnant women named Zoe (Arsinee Khanjian), surveys the action in the nightclub below through apertures shaped like the nude bodies of women. But this is more than an office. It’s also Zoe’s home, and we eventually learn that she inherited it as well as the club from her mother. It’s a private womb inside a public womb, a sacred homestead inside a profane nightclub–or a profane homestead inside a sacred nightclub–and everything that Exotica is about radiates from its troubled center.
Alternating with this story–a relatively benign and unneurotic account of “exotic” sexual cruising, at least in this movie’s terms–are the interlocking stories of Francis, Chrissy, Eric, and Zoe, some of which involve comparable repetition compulsions. Every night Francis and Chrissy go through the same routine at the nightclub: he talks to her about what might happen to her if he weren’t around to protect her while she performs a partial striptease in close proximity to him, almost touching him but never quite making contact; then he excuses himself to go to the men’s room, where he masturbates in one of the stalls. Via flashbacks, we learn that Eric and Chrissy originally met as members of the search party looking for Francis’s daughter and that this meeting apparently led to Zoe’s hiring Eric. Then, in a flashback that comprises the last scene in the movie (though it’s the earliest scene in the film’s chronology), we learn that Chrissy was the daughter’s original baby-sitter.
What I like about these camera movements, combined with the exotic, erotic ambience of Mychael Danna’s score, is that they simultaneously implicate us in the characters’ fantasies and place us at some distance from them. We literally view the action from shifting perspectives, but the rhythm and direction of our drifting gaze seem to place us directly inside the obsessions of the characters. Like them, we’re looking for a final resting place that only a home and a family can provide–cruising in search of some notion of fulfillment that seems lost in the distant past.
