Monday, December 04, 2006
Miscarriage of love
I thought there was a recurring idea of birth and parenthood in the movie. Thomas is incubating eggs, which get taken from him. Francis and Christina and presumably Tracey were caregivers for Francis' daughter, who gets taken from him. Eric found the daughter's body. Tracey's dad loans his daughter to his now childless friend. Zoe is pregnant with Eric's child, upon whom Eric will presumably have no claim because of the contract. Francis is sort of a father figure to Christina. Zoe inherited the club from her mother, and now she acts the part of a benevolent matriarch to her employees. There are all these parental type, caregiving relationships, and yet everyone seems so uncared for and alone.
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7 comments:
That is a very important idea. It is also important in “The Sweet Hereafter” which is the only other Egoyan film I have seen. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find it in his other work too.
Christina is understandably upset to discover that Eric is the stud for Zoe’s child. But she also seems to really wonder what Zoe thinks she is doing. Zoe has said that she deeply craves having a child. But I was wondering, as perhaps Christina is, why? Is she just driven by instinct? Is she trying to recreate the relationship she had with her own mother? To better fill her mother’s role? There was a great shot of her sitting on the couch with all those black and white photos from her mother’s time on the wall behind her.
Did you notice that there were eggs in Thomas’s apartment, a live parrot in Tracey and her dad’s place, a dead (stuffed) parrot in the club?
Yes, I noticed the parrots. Not sure what to make of that. In the scene toward the end where Zoe is in the DJ booth watching Christina dance, she is fervently petting the stuffed parrot.
Yes, that is one of the reasons why I thought the parrots are significant. When Francis asks his brother if the parrot forgot what it used to be able to say, his brother said:
“They are not supposed to forget, it must have just lost interest.”
Oh, I just saw on IMDB that Zoe is Atom Egoyan's wife, and that they made the film when she was actually seven months pregnant. So is the pregnancy a sort of accidental theme? hehe
I noticed the stuffed parrot in particular - that petting scene is so odd. I figured it was significant somehow, but I'm still not sure what to make of it either.
This doesn’t strike me as the sort of movie with many accidental themes. It would be cool to know at what point Egoyan’s wife was cast and if she was pregnant already. Did that cause a rewrite?
So nobody has a good take on the parrots? They could just be an image of something “exotic”. But I agree that the petting scene was odd.
Overall I really liked this movie. As cl knows, I'm a fan of Twin Peaks and in a way Exotica reminded me of Lynch's films. I like the surprises in the relationships that develop and trying to decode the meanings.
The topics you've brought up so far are great! I wish I had time to see the film again.
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