‘The Atom Egoyan Collection’ Features Director’s Best Works

‘THE ATOM EGOYAN COLLECTION’ FEATURES DIRECTOR’S BEST WORKS

Tuesday, April 8th, 2014

Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan

LOS ANGELES (The Arts Desk)–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), 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.”