Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

christopher-underwood Returning to this film after a gap of many years, I find it just as stunning as I remember, even if I remember very few of the scenes. Of course I did remember Mia Kirshner's schoolgirl strip to Leonard Cohen! The film is particularly effective and affecting because the characters are so well portrayed that they seem to be unravelling exactly what is going on the same as we are. I understand that Egoyan dislikes audition for his actors, preferring to select them on past work (preferably theatre work) and then presenting them with the part. In that way they take ownership of the character and we get to experience a very emotional tale. A list of the more difficult themes in which this film engages would put off many and that the main location is a posh strip club might seem an obstacle for many. Nevertheless this is an important, beautifully shot film in which seemingly minor moments turn out to have great significance, first for one and then another. Mesmerising with perfect direction, camera work, acting and music. I cannot praise this work of art more highly.

chaos-rampant In the camera, the score, the acting, the overall air, this is worthy of Lynch and Kieslowski. It exhibits the same soft touch across all these elements. It has latenight moods I love, the languorous hum of noir mystery. I'm happy to be introduced to this filmmaker's world for the first time.But it also has something I value even more than how appearances seranade me, it has passage inside to where the formations of life begin - the surge that moves the worlds we inhabit and manifests as self, emotions and anxieties.It's about a man who looks stricken when we first see him. He goes to a strip club, a young girl in a school outfit dances for him. We're led to believe that it's simply desire, perhaps concealing a tiredness about life that has seen its best days go that he drowns at nights. It goes much deeper. There's another young girl that he drives home to her father at nights, no explanations given. We assume some unethical business. We assume a burden with her father that is not spoken out loud and just hangs between them.There's a club deejay who announces the girls as surrogate director of the show, a former lover of the girl's; he introduces her on stage as sexually mysterious, asking what is it that draws us to her, what kind of reprieve is this desire for her looking for?This along with everything else we see through the looking glass of concealed identity, amalgamated in the club (named the same as the film itself no less) as a space where performance is exchanged from behind guises. The place is marvelous, a cavernous hall with palm trees and a hushed, tropical atmosphere - but of course that's only the seductive illusion, the lush foliage probably plastic.And there's the bookish guy we first saw at airport security, a very reserved person who it's like every day is just something that slips through the fingers for him. He's running a store with tropical animals, strange and exotic beings but they're merely kept inside glass, artificially framed nature. He goes to the ballet - artificially framed nature - hoping for intimacy on the way out, unsure.Another visual segment takes place in a green field, a stroll with the dancer girl and this as getting to know her, falling for her.All this is like swimming in slow, languorous waters, so when the different layers are made to align, we break the surface to come up for air and painful clarity. All these people as trapped in vistas of their own self, their nature artificially confined by hurt. It's touching her - shattering the allowed boundaries of performance - that breaks the spell and releases first one, then the others.It's all been about this narrator who has allowed himself to remain confined in a performance, a chimera of the mind - reliving the hurt both with one girl at the club, and with the second at home. Now we are where everything comes into being. It's one of the great post noir works I know.Noir Meter: 2/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Post

itamarscomix Exotica is my first Atom Egoyan film, and I'm now inclined to go out and go through his entire catalog. The title and DVD cover may make is seem like an erotic thriller at first, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth; Exotica is a beautiful, dark, low-key drama that seduces the viewer with sensuality and sexuality but maintains a chilly distance throughout.Exotica takes place in a strip club but isn't at any time titillating. It keeps the viewer out both sexually and emotionally - it's a character study piece that doesn't allow us to get into the head of any of the characters, one that doesn't have a real protagonist. Every character is a stranger to us and they all keep secrets from us and from each other, secrets that unravel as the film unfolds in a deliberately slow and strictly structured pace.I'm glad that I went into Exotica knowing next to nothing about it, and so should you. Quit reading reviews and just watch it.

tieman64 This is a review of "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Exotica", two films by Atom Egoyan, both of which deal with tragedy and loss and both of which feature the same actors in similar roles.Like most of his films, Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter" is structured as a jigsaw possible assembled around a single traumatic event. As the film unfolds, and the cast's relationship to the central event grows in clarity, some moment of revelation is achieved. Virtually all of Egoyan's films adopt this narrative structure, which seems to blend a modernist search for truth with a decidedly postmodern admittance that truth requires the careful sorting of both vantage points and testimonials.The traumatic event in this case is an accident involving a school bus. The bus skids off a road and veers onto a frozen lake. The ice breaks, the bus sinks and 14 children die. Of course, everyone in the town then suffers the knock-on effect of this accident.Man, you might say, is a creature constantly in search of meaning (the brain itself is a pattern recognition machine). He creates myths, patterns and rhymes, trying desperately to assert some measure of order. He cannot accept the chaotic cruelty of the universe, preferring instead to create comfortable rituals and routines in the hope of insulating himself from pain.When the unexpected does occur, man lifts his head and cries "Why?". But God never answers. Into this vacuum steps Ian Holm, who in "The Sweet Hereafter" plays a lawyer trying desperately to assign meaning to the film's central bus crash. He wants the parents of the dead children to band together and file a law suit. A law suit against who? The guilty bus driver? Nope, the driver is broke. He wants to go after the company that made the bus. He wants to sue them for millions. It is their fault. Alone.At first Ian Holm comes across as a greedy pig. Here is a man milking suffering for money. But gradually we learn that he is himself a man intimately familiar with loss. His life has been one of misery, and the film is peppered with flashbacks detailing his relationship with his daughter, a drug addict who is dying of AIDS. Like the parents whom he hopes to represent, this lawyer is looking for the meaning of his own suffering. "Why me?" he cries. Lashing out against others and assigning blame is the only way he can rationalise things.Similarly, the small town in which the accident occurs seems at first to be a picturesque postcard village. But gradually this image is shattered, as promiscuity, infidelity, alcoholism and sexual abuse all raise their heads. Director Atom Egoyan, an outspoken fan of "The Shining", even uses the famous "Horse and Train" picture from Kubrick's film, a recognition that both films deal subliminally with the same buried, almost invisible horrors.On top of all this, Egoyan adds a layer of myth. He has one of the film's children narrate Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". In a self referential moment, the child asks "Who took the children? Who was the piper? Why did the fabled portal in the mountain (the breaking ice) open up and swallow the kids?"In this way, Egoyan approaches his central the tragedy from at least 3 angles. Firstly, as a fateful moment of chance, secondly, as a mythical act of God (God smites the parent's for their sins) and thirdly as an event exploited by a vengeful pilgrim of pain. All three approaches seek to lay blame, targeting either the failures of parents, the actions of a punishing god or the laws of a wholly arbitrary cosmos."The Sweet Hereafter" is a very hopeless film, man never able to grasp absolute clarity (which of my behaviours, if any, caused this?). But there's also something very hopeful about Egoyan's ending. The sweet hereafter of the title is that zone of wisdom (found by the child who narrates the Piped Piper) where we ultimately come to accept the unacceptable and go on living.Similar in structure, Egoyan's "Exotica" approaches the same themes from a different angle. A man (Francis) loses his wife and daughter in a car crash. To cope with the pain he hires a young girl to come over to his house every day and babysit the daughter he lost. This babysitter simply plays a piano and lurks about his empty house, after which the bereaved father drives her home and pays her for babysitting nothingness. This ritual helps Francis assuage his pain. Every night Francis also visits a strip-club called "Exotica". There he watches a young woman (Christina), dressed in a schoolgirl's outfit, strip. But their relationship is an odd one. They seem to have a strange history. When she dances for him, it has nothing to do with sex and more to do with longing and loss. Of course both Francis and the stripper have a secret which is incrementally revealed, the truth peeled back like a stripper's clothes, leading to that revelatory final payoff that is typical of Egoyan's work. I won't spoil that moment. Suffice to say that this movie takes us into fairly interesting places. For Egoyan, man seems to live a life of cyclical substitution (we grow or are pushed out of everything and are forced to find substitutes). It's a bleak film, but unlike the work of Sam Mendes, to whom Egoyan is often wrongly compared, Egoyan eschews easy sensationalism and carnival freak-shows. 8.5/10 - Worth two viewings.