wed 27/11/2024

DVD: The Atom Egoyan Collection | reviews, news & interviews

DVD: The Atom Egoyan Collection

DVD: The Atom Egoyan Collection

Enigmatic Armenian-Canadian director's best work boxed

Ian Holm and Sarah Polley in 'The Sweet Hereafter'

Atom Egoyan’s stock has dropped a bit in the 21st century. This box-set of his first seven films remains – along with his response to the Turkish genocide of Armenians, Ararat (2002) – the essence of his work to date.

These early films have as much personal character as his compatriot and mentor Cronenberg’s. His feature debut Next of Kin (1984), in which a teenager escapes his loveless home by pretending to be a Toronto Armenian family’s long-lost son, introduces several themes: carefully faked identities, and the erasable memories enabled by video-tape. Family Viewing (1988), Speaking Parts (1989) and The Adjuster (1991) elaborate these ideas with a deadpan comic edge, and a growing repertory company including his wife Arsinee Khanjian and Elias Koteas. Calendar (1993) stars Egoyan as a “nightmare” version of himself, filming in Armenia’s hilltop churches and crumbling post-Soviet cities, bringing the autobiography scattered through his films to the fore.

In Exotica (1994), the characters’ cool suppressions disintegrate in the hothouse of a tropically themed strip-club. The nature of the relationship between a schoolgirl-dressed stripper (Mia Kirshner, pictured right), an obsessed customer (Bruce Greenwood) and a child’s murder is unpicked in a film of interwoven secrets, two-way mirrors and voyeuristic alcoves. Sarah Polley, these days a fine director herself, joined Egoyan’s regulars here. She then made her name in The Sweet Hereafter (1997), an adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel about the aftermath of a small-town school-bus’s fatal crash. Polley’s piercing intelligence as a surviving, abused child matches Ian Holm as a fearsome, ambulance-chasing lawyer with a drug-addict daughter and devastated heart. Gratefully helped by Banks’s command of character, Egoyan’s structuring of time achieves a potent grace. His rhythmic revealing of satisfying, deep mysteries peaks with these two films.

Extras include a thorough 1999 Egoyan interview, Formulas for Seduction, and three early shorts, Howard In Particular, Peepshow and Open House.

Sarah Polley’s piercing intelligence as a surviving, abused child matches Ian Holm as a fearsome, ambulance-chasing lawyer

rating

Editor Rating: 
4
Average: 4 (1 vote)

Share this article

Add comment

The future of Arts Journalism

 

You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!

We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d

And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters