Egoyan's Exotica: Thursday, Feb. 2
Special screening in partnership with CanStage
by Staff
Atom Egoyan has stepped into live theatre, directing Cruel and Tender by noted British playwright Martin Crimp at the St. Lawrence Centre to Feb. 18. The play, an adaptation of a Sophocles’ tragedy, offers commentary on suspect motives in battle and the post 9/11 war on terrorism.
To coincide with this production, The Revue, in partnership with CanStage, presents Egoyan’s 1994 film Exotica on Thursday, Feb. 2, at 7 p.m.
The award-winning movie, with Egoyan’s ensemble cast, has a 97 per cent approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website and earned critical praise.
Roger Ebert, in his four-star review comments: "In the months after Pulp Fiction opened, I talked to a lot of people who were stimulated by its plot structure, the way it played with apparent paradoxes. Those people are likely to admire the plot of Exotica even more, for if Pulp Fiction twisted time as an exercise, "Exotica" has a reason for its method: We begin with desperation and need, and move to satisfaction and fulfillment, and at the same time Egoyan astonishingly finds a way to add melodrama, blackmail and an ingenious deception. The movie is a series of interlocking surprises and delights, and, at the end, it is heartbreaking as well. It's quite a performance, announcing Egoyan's arrival in the first rank of filmmakers."
The New York Times says: "Early in Atom Egoyan's brazen Exotica, the director deftly drops in the ideas that come to haunt the film: eroticism, secrecy and the skewed way we look at things. Nothing is what it seems, least of all the film we're watching. Despite its lurid-sounding subject, Exotica turns out to be less erotic than eerie. It raises moral questions of guilt and responsibility, plays with post-modern ideas about perception and, by the end, even involves blackmail and murder."
Special guests.