EXOTICA is the Egoyan movie for people who feel faintly guilty about never having seen one: it may be Art, but at least it's set in a strip club, albeit the most portentous strip club in North America.
Pet shop owner Thomas (Don McKellar), arrives at the airport with a clutch of smuggled macaw eggs in tow. Sharing a cab with a stranger, he winds up at Exotica, an upscale girlie club with a wildly artificial jungle motif and a high-tech sound system that blasts disco versions of Urdu ghazals.
Its star stripper is Christina (Mia Kirshner), who exploits her pedophilic allure by dressing in a schoolgirl's uniform. Two men are obsessed with her: longhaired DJ Eric (Elias Koteas) and tax auditor Francis (Bruce Greenwood). Zoe (Arsinee Khanjian), the hugely pregnant owner of Exotica, has
befriended the troubled Christina; she's also paid Eric to father her child. All the principal characters are drawn together when Francis begins an audit of Thomas's pet store, and we finally learn what has drawn them into their tortured relationship.
EXOTICA sounds terrifically lurid and interesting, but like most Egoyan films, it's far more interesting in the telling than in the watching. It's easy to defend Egoyan as a serious and provocative filmmaker, since all his liabilities can be made to sound like the results of his rigorous
intellectual defiance of mainstream norms. His characters are opaque because they're meant to defy bourgeois psychological conventions. His plots are unconvincing because they explore modes of storytelling that challenge received notions of good narrative structure. His movies are dull because he
rejects the audience's Pavlovian desire for familiar scene structure and easy narrative resolution. Egoyan is a phenomenally successful filmmaker on his own terms. But he's still a pretentious bore. leave a comment
