Or so says Leonard Cohen in the song that Christina dances to at the Exotica club. But we the viewers don’t know. And the participants on screen don’t know either. As this carefully woven film unfolds, we are given three storylines but no understanding of how they might fit together. Soon we see that some of the characters know things that the others don’t. And we realize that we know things that some of the characters don’t while they must know things we don’t.
I was impressed with this movie on first viewing it, and like it even better now that I have seen it several times. But I think one thing I have lost in knowing the film better is the sense of repeated revelation from the first viewing. I’m looking forward to what those of you who have never seen it before have to say, and maybe I can briefly relive that experience vicariously.
The very structure of the movie is built around this withholding of knowledge and understanding with the three seemingly unconnected storylines, but also with some of the visual devices. Time and again we see characters viewed through one way mirrors. The first line of the film is said by an as yet unseen customs agent: “You have to ask yourself what brought the person to this point?” He says this to another agent who is watching a suspect through a one way mirror—a suspect he will later have a tryst with without revealing himself. Then at the Exotica club, the one way mirrors figure repeatedly as we see three of our characters observing through the glass: Eric, Francis, and finally, Zoe.
The other visual embodiment of this obscurity is just obscurity. One of our storylines is a group of people crossing open fields of tall grass. We quickly realize that they are searching, and the open vistas are of no help to them because what they want to find would be down in the grass. At least one of the participants, Eric, feels that it is probably a futile quest and tells Christina “There are so many places you could hide something in this country.” But the most compelling image of obscurity is the murky green but glowing tanks in Thomas’s pet shop. What lives in there? Francis is disturbed by some strange creature in a tank in the moments before he discovers Thomas’s gun.
17 comments:
Rick, I felt like a lot of the story was about what the director didn't show. The key missing gap for me (I wish I'd had time to watch the movie more than once) was what transpired that Christina stopped baby-sitting Francis' daughter and Tracey began. Did you think something inappropriate happened between Christina and Francis? Obviously baby-sitter Christina was supposed to look much younger than the Christina searching the fields, so there was some break in there that goes unexplained. The ending shot of young Christina going into that house is haunting.
Likewise, there's the lack of explanation for how these seeming idealists, Eric and Christina, end up as they do.
Also, I was misled about Francis and Tracey's relationship in part because I had seen "The Sweet Hereafter" and jumped to the conclusion that Sarah Polley's role would have some kind of sexual overtone.
Having seen “The Sweet Hereafter” could color your impressions of Francis and Tracey. But I think there is a hint of that even without Egoyan’s other movie.
Christina is the character that we know the least about even by the end of the movie. She seems by far the most truthful in her interactions, but she says very little about herself.
I had the sense, due partly to the one-way mirror motif that Rick points out, that we weren't supposed to fully understand the movie — as if we were just voyeurs (like the men at the strip club) spying on the characters' lives, unable to ask for explanations, unable to have the fulfillment of answered questions (like the men were unable to have the fufillment of touch). The experience is designed to feel incomplete, to arouse yearning with no solution —except for what the individual can devise later in his solitude. I don't know how much $5 in 1994 Canadian money (the price of a lap dance) would have been, but I wonder if it's comparable to the price of a movie admission.
A cultural observation: I think the revelation of the gun affects American audiences differently. Here it is not especially remarkable that a business owner would have a handgun in a drawer. That detail must seem much more sinister in Canada.
Fun fact: In 1996, handguns were used to murder 2 people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Great Britain, 106 in Canada, 211 in Germany, and 9,390 in the United States.
DW said: Christina is the character that we know the least about even by the end of the movie. She seems by far the most truthful in her interactions, but she says very little about herself.
I think she's also remarkable because she forms deep bonds with all the principal players. She and Francis obviously have a singular connection. She and Eric were lovers. She and Zoe have a relationship that is apparently sexual. And even the gay man, Thomas, seems enthralled with her. So, yeah, what is it about a schoolgirl?
I wonder if perhaps we could see Christina and Thomas as poles. Christina seems most truthful and formed these deep bonds. Thomas seems the least truthful and the most resistant to bonds. They both ask a lot of questions, but Thomas seems to be asking for his own benefit or to get people to lay out explicitly what they have already implied, whereas many of Christina’s questions or comments seem to be to get people to explore themselves. Neither say much about themselves.
The opening question is meant for us. We are to ask ourselves what brought these people to this point.
The non-linear structure is an important part of that quest. As we learn more about the characters, we revise our answer. But I think we make it better. This is not a flip post-modern deconstruction of the possibilities of knowledge, but a process that has some similarities to learning about a real person. As you learn more about their history, you can better answer the question of what brought them to this point. But there won’t be a complete final answer. There will always be things we won’t learn.
We are left to try and make reasonable guesses about the bits we don’t know. I think cl’s suggestion that maybe there was something inappropriate between Francis and Christina when she was young is unlikely. Perhaps she quit babysitting for some simple reason like she went off to school. But it also seems like she might have had some sort of breakdown. It sounded like she had no connect with her parents and she was very hesitant and insecure. By the time she meets Eric, she has become a very different and much healthier.
Or if not healthy, at least more functional.
Did Tracey ever baby sit for Francis' daughter? I got the impression she came along after the murder. Her dad thought she was going over to practice music, not baby sit a phantom child.
I think that probably must be right. Tracey is still rather young, and the child must have been killed several years ago for Christina to have had all her history between babysitting and now working at the club. She has been at the club a few years at least.
I suppose that when Tracey first started it wasn’t for the “baby”? Don’t you think that Francis probably worked it around in that direction over time?
He pays Tracey rather well for this phantom baby sitting—a lot more than the table dancers get at the club.
Yeah, it wouldn't make sense for Tracey to have ever baby-sat the girl. Tracey is about the age now that Christina was when she was baby-sitting, which was clearly several years ago.
It seemed odd to me that Francis would be the one to drive home the baby-sitter. When I was baby-sitting at that age, the husband never drove me home alone. The wife always came along if the husband was driving. I got the impression this was to avoid any sense of impropriety or to make me more comfortable. I would think that with someone like Francis -- who had an odd, overly friendly interest in these adolescent girls -- that kind of cautiousness would be even more necessary.
I don't know. I still think there was something to Francis initiating this fatherly intimacy with Christina and then the sexual nature of their later relationship, even if she was primarily providing him comfort. Remember that Francis said the daughter liked Christina, and yet Christina tells Eric that she only watched the child a few times. I think part of the story is what we didn't see happen between Francis and Christina while she was still an adolescent.
Oh, I got the impression that possibly something shady was going on with Christina's real father when she was a teen. Francis tells her in the car that he's available to talk if there's some problem at home. And when Christina was telling Thomas, "I do things for him, and he's done things for me," I thought she meant that he had been a protective father figure to her when she was young, implying that she hadn't been able to trust her real father in that way.
Speaking of "everybody knows" but me, I just now realized that Tracey's dad is the brother that Francis' wife had an affair with and that's why he's in a wheelchair and why there is tension between them. I think I should watch the movie again.
I thought Christina had a troubled home life, too. I didn't think even in the stripper context that her relationship with Francis was sexual. I think it was something else, but it's hard to put a finger on. Christina seems outwardly sexual with everyone, even with Zoe, like that's just how she relates to people — sort of all or nothing. It's also sort of like she has transcended sex.
Francis is like a father figure to her, but not quite. And she is like a daughter figure to him, but not quite. They can't be entirely what the other needs, which is part of the tragedy.
Good grief, until Erin pointed it out, I did not realize that Tracey's dad was Harold. Wow.
Erin, I also wish I'd watched the movie twice. Especially because so much is revealed at the end, I would have benefited from going back and rewatching at least the Christina-Francis exchanges. But alas, I waited too late to watch Kim's copy and had to take it back.
From an earlier comment, were you all watching it on tape? If so, you ought to put this on your mental long term list and watch it again, say next year, on DVD. It is a very rich and complex movie to try and absorb all in the first go. Choosing it for the club gave me a good reason to see it again.
My own take on the characters is rather close to kc’s. Christina’s relationship to Francis is certainly as intense as a sexual one. But I don’t think it is that in any straightforward way.
Something nobody has mentioned yet. At first I just read Eric as a jealous boyfriend. But when he is explaining why he threw Francis out so violently, he talks about how he used to like watching Christina with Francis and how much it used to sooth Francis. When Eric says this, it is hard to believe he cares about that. But after that embrace with Francis at the end, well maybe?
Also, Eric has been watching, but he never hears what Francis and Christina say to each other. (We don’t hear either the first time we see them together.) Eric watches from a distance up on the DJ table, or he watches up close through the one-way glass. Then when he confronts Francis in the bathroom, he can hear but not see. And what does Francis say they talk about? “The usual.”
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