Platypuschow With a cast of familiar faces this thriller/drama goes nowhere fast in fact I'm not sure it goes anywhere at all. Lifeless, dull, ridiculously ungripping and considering half the film is set in a strip joint not even visually appealing! The last time I was this bored watching a film it was the critically acclaimed Inception (2010) the film that bred a new type of pseudo intellectual movie fan with the moniker of "If you don't like it you didn't understand it" Well I understood that over-convoluted mess and I still didn't like it.Exotica brings nothing to the table, not even a young Mia Kirchner stripping in a school girl outfit could turn this embarrassment around.

chaos-rampant In the camera, the score, the acting, the overall air, this is worthy of Lynch and Kieslowski. It exhibits the same soft touch across all these elements. It has latenight moods I love, the languorous hum of noir mystery. I'm happy to be introduced to this filmmaker's world for the first time.But it also has something I value even more than how appearances seranade me, it has passage inside to where the formations of life begin - the surge that moves the worlds we inhabit and manifests as self, emotions and anxieties.It's about a man who looks stricken when we first see him. He goes to a strip club, a young girl in a school outfit dances for him. We're led to believe that it's simply desire, perhaps concealing a tiredness about life that has seen its best days go that he drowns at nights. It goes much deeper. There's another young girl that he drives home to her father at nights, no explanations given. We assume some unethical business. We assume a burden with her father that is not spoken out loud and just hangs between them.There's a club deejay who announces the girls as surrogate director of the show, a former lover of the girl's; he introduces her on stage as sexually mysterious, asking what is it that draws us to her, what kind of reprieve is this desire for her looking for?This along with everything else we see through the looking glass of concealed identity, amalgamated in the club (named the same as the film itself no less) as a space where performance is exchanged from behind guises. The place is marvelous, a cavernous hall with palm trees and a hushed, tropical atmosphere - but of course that's only the seductive illusion, the lush foliage probably plastic.And there's the bookish guy we first saw at airport security, a very reserved person who it's like every day is just something that slips through the fingers for him. He's running a store with tropical animals, strange and exotic beings but they're merely kept inside glass, artificially framed nature. He goes to the ballet - artificially framed nature - hoping for intimacy on the way out, unsure.Another visual segment takes place in a green field, a stroll with the dancer girl and this as getting to know her, falling for her.All this is like swimming in slow, languorous waters, so when the different layers are made to align, we break the surface to come up for air and painful clarity. All these people as trapped in vistas of their own self, their nature artificially confined by hurt. It's touching her - shattering the allowed boundaries of performance - that breaks the spell and releases first one, then the others.It's all been about this narrator who has allowed himself to remain confined in a performance, a chimera of the mind - reliving the hurt both with one girl at the club, and with the second at home. Now we are where everything comes into being. It's one of the great post noir works I know.Noir Meter: 2/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Post

Chrysanthepop Egoyan's 'Exotica' is about emotionally isolated people who try to connect with each other. With every interaction between the characters there are symbolic barriers either in the form of finance, two way mirrors and social rules. But once this barrier is seized (symbolically) in the form of physical contact like the touch between Thomas and Chrissy and between Frances and Eric they form a connection. Egoyan does not resolve the 'problems' by showing the characters healed but instead what he demonstrates is that this human connection has brought change within them.In contrast, we also see how the characters once connected but now have drifted apart like Frances and Kristina or Zoe and Eric or Thomas and the officer. Explaining it more would be giving away too much of the story. While we see all these characters struggle to connect, there is Zoe who tries to keep things together but she too is sitting behind a one-way mirror. Egoyan uses plenty of symbolism and simple storytelling just isn't his style. He uses a rather suggestive approach. What he does in 'Exotica' is reveal very slowly.Moving at a slow pace, the film does 'test' the viewer's patience but there are a lot of subtle things happening and one has to observe closely to see that things aren't what they seem on the surface. There's a film-noire type quality to it. A lot of darkness is used, both symbolically and actually. The dialogues are simple but profound in depth. The haunting soundtrack gives the film a seductive and sensual edge.The performances are superb all the way. This is the first time I see Bruce Greenwood turn in a decent performance. Elias Koteas and Don McKellar are first rate. A very young Sarah Polley shows what potential she has. Arsinée Khanjian is terrific. Mia Kirschner blends excellently blends sensuality, pain, fragility and kindness into Chrissy.'Exotica' is not everyone's kind of film. Some may find its theme too dark and too intense but it's a film that isn't afraid to reveal, suggest and challenge the viewer.

Dennis Littrell (Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)Atom Egoyan's Exotica is an outstanding movie. I have seen Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) which is also very good. A father's (obsessive) love for his daughter(s) is featured in both movies, consequently the theme must mean something special to Egoyan. He is a most talented and original movie maker, a Canadian as are his players, Bruce Greenwood, (Francis Brown, the accountant whose daughter was murdered), Sarah Polley, (Tracey, the high school girl), and Mia Kirshner, (Christina, the exotic dancer). His wife, Arsinee Khanjian and Polley were also featured in The Sweet Hereafter.What really makes the movie is Egoyan's use of time and action sequence. He cuts up the chronological order of events and then presents them in a dramatic way. This is not so easy to do. Christopher Nolan in Memento (2000) used the same technique to great advantage. I have come late to such a technique and would love to master it myself. I worked on it last year and a couple of years before. You can't just scissor it and then paste it back together. Something must be gained from reversing the order of events. When Eric and Christina are shown walking the fields in a long line of people I jumped to the conclusion that Tracey would be found dead. We don't learn that Francis lost his daughter until the film is nearly finished.The psychology of Francis and the young girls is interesting. Christina says she gave something to him and he gave something to her. This vagueness with its unmistakable sexuality is something that always exists between young girls and older men. And, as Egoyan observes, there are rules and awkwardness, and confused emotions. However the girl wants it made unmistakably clear that she is desired physically and just talk is almost never sufficient. She often doesn't know whether she really wants to be "taken" fully, and of course that is usually, shall we say, problematic. Some great subtly is required in handled such a theme, and Egoyan realizes that. His character Francis Brown is content with fantasy and does not touch at all.This film would have found a larger audience except for the title, the theme, and the milieu. The female audience for the most part didn't even consider watching the movie since, as one woman said, I thought it was just another movie with an older man lusting after a girl half his age. That theme bores women to death. But surprisingly at the IMDb a viewer asks how women feel about the film and several write in to say that they liked it. Another poster remarks that women over forty actually liked Exotica in higher percentages than males.I thought the veracious and business-like depiction of the exotic dancer club was well done. The very nice side plot with the gay animal importer was just a perfect fit for the main plot. Egoyan wrote the script. It is a great script. So much surprises. It's almost too good. For me, since I have seen so many, many movies, something different, some surprises in plot, in character, in treatment are always welcome.And the plot does surprise. Even when the protagonist, Francis waits outside the club to shoot Eric, Egoyan turns the situation on its head by having Eric appear from the side and explain something that changes Francis's attitude toward him.I am being vague because I don't want to spoil the story. Some movies—most movies I would say, since I go back to the generation that would go into the theatre and sit down during the middle of the movie; and then four or five hours later, realize, "This is where I came in"--in most movies to know the ending or the plot would not spoil the movie. We know so and so dies at the end. What is interesting is how he dies, how the actions develops. But in this movie to know the plot would take something away.I think. I'm not sure. Anyway Francis is a tax auditor who lost his daughter when she was less than eight years old. She was murdered. The police initially thought he did it, but he was found innocent and the murderer was apprehended and convicted. But Francis is left hollow and tries to bring her back in a way by having teenage girls "babysit" his nonexistent daughter. Egoyan teases us near the beginning by showing Francis and Tracey in his car as he drops her off at her home giving her some money and asking, "Are you free Thursday?" Very near the end of the movie we find that Tracey had a precursor in that babysitting role. You might be able to guess who it was.The sound track features "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen.