Calendar

Egoyan stars as an irritable, self-absorbed Canadian photographer who goes to Armenia to shoot 12 churches for a calendar. Armed with both a still camera and an 8mm video recorder, Egoyan brings along his striking, Armenian-born wife (Arsinee Khanjian) to act as a translator. They hire a soft-spoken local guide (Ashot Adamian), who provides the detailed historical background of each church. The photographer's wife gradually develops an attachment to her native land, and finds herself alienated from her husband, who seems unable or unwilling to react emotionally to the country's beauty and serenity. As the shoot progresses, the photographer watches his wife develop a bond with the guide, and he returns to Canada alone. Over the next calendar year, the photographer spends his time reviewing videotapes of the trip, and has dinner with a succession of women, each of whom excuses herself during the meal to make a phone call in his kitchen, each using a different foreign language evidently speaking to a lover. The photographer frequently attempts to write to his wife, who periodically calls and leaves concerned and bewildered messages on his answering machine.

CALENDAR cuts between the present, where all the scenes take place in the photographer's apartment, the remembered past, as recalled in color flashback, and the recorded past, expressed by 8mm black-and-white videotape sequences. In a way that is less pretentious than it sounds, history, memory, and personal/ancestral identity are revealed as constructions, and the ambiguous role of new technologies in shaping our understanding of past and present is foregrounded. But Egoyan's critique of spectatorship--a theme that has become virtually de rigeur in recent arthouse cinema--is thankfully neither dry nor academic. CALENDAR is clearly a very personal film for the director, who was born in Cairo and raised in Armenia; the casting of Khanjian, Egoyan's real-life wife, who has appeared in all of his films, adds a special resonance to this study of betrayal. In the Armenian scenes, we hear but do not see the photographer; our point of view is always from behind the camera. In one scene, the photographer announces to his wife and the guide that he has been surreptitiously videotaping them, as if hoping to record the roots of infidelity as they are exposed. What's wrenching about CALENDAR is that the photographer seems incapable of putting the camera aside in order to comfort his obviously distressed wife. He's reduced to "watching the two of you leave me, and disappear into a landscape I'm about to photograph."

CALENDAR is brought to emotional life by Khanjian's touching, sensuous performance; she's capable of suggesting profound emotion through minimal gestures and facial expressions. The film is gorgeously shot, and the Armenian countryside, with its uniquely nuanced play of light and color, is truly haunting. The film makes hypnotic use of repetitive images, particularly a videotaped segment of Khanjian roaming through a flock of sheep (a scene which ultimately provides a key revelation in the narrative). Music is also used to great effect, and CALENDAR's first-rate soundtrack juxtaposes Middle Eastern and Western blues music to offset the Armenian and Canadian cultures. (Adult situations.) leave a comment