**** CALENDAR
(Masterpiece) Directed and written by Atom Egoyan With Arsinee Khanjian, Ashot Adamian, and Atom Egoyan.
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What has always seemed problematic about Egoyan’s slicker (and to my mind more pretentious) productions, for all their virtues, is that they exploit various sexual hang-ups more than they try to understand them. In contrast to his low-budget films, which at least on the surface are more naturalistic, Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, and Exotica all have the shape and feel of allegorical fantasies, but closed, claustrophobic ones, without road maps or commentaries. This isn’t to say they’re pornographic, at least in any overt way, or that analysis is entirely absent from them. What bothers me is that they use ideas about both pornography and analysis as come-ons to the audience, but the painful and difficult material we’re drawn into ultimately loops back on itself without leading to any new understanding.
In other words, these films are structured like the obsessions they deal with. Because of that, narrative progression in the usual sense is generally kept to a minimum; at most one sees the gradual exposition of an already existing situation, or variations on a theme. There’s no real character development or advancement of any didactic argument; as in all of Egoyan’s movies, internalized emotional states count for much more than plot points. These films are often alluring, at least initially, insofar as they’re hypnotic and mysterious. Yet they never quite explain enough to entirely dissolve the mysteries or break the hypnosis; at best the denouements merely round out the descriptions of the obsessions involved. As political statements about human potential they qualify as defeatist, and it’s not all that easy to separate diagnosis from disease. They’re spiritual stripteases that never quite reveal a naked soul; at some point, it seems, the equivalent to a fig leaf in Egoyan’s imagination steps in, a spiritual counterpart to the Ontario censor board.
The precise nature of the husband’s nearly identical sessions with the various women is never spelled out. At first they appear to be dates, but subsequent clues suggest they’re auditions; either way, they’re always laden with erotic possibilities that are then disrupted when the women begin speaking to someone else in a foreign language, thereby reproducing some version of the husband’s Armenian trauma. (We hear a couple of messages on the answering machine from someone named Julia describing some of the women coming over and the various languages they can or can’t speak, which establishes that these scenes are preplanned rather than coincidental; one of the many comic repetitions is that each time the husband pours wine for himself and his companion, it’s just before she leaves the room to make her call, and each time he finishes off the bottle.)
