Exotica

As the writer, director, and producer of several impressive films, Atom Egoyan is consolidating a reputation as a master illusionist whose works beg to be analyzed and yet resist interpretation. Though Egoyan's films demand to be taken seriously, they resolutely, mischievously, subvert the viewers’ expectations. Enigmatic and self-transparent, they respect an inner logic analogous to the structure of dreams. It is almost as though Egoyan were impelled to communicate something which he would simultaneously withhold. His latest film, Exotica, recalls those spectacular desserts in which the simplest materials (gelatin, food coloring, fruit) produce a three-dimensional extravaganza in which glistening slices of fruit are visible in transparent polychrome layers, suggesting that one should look but not touch, admire but not taste.

Exotica certainly presents an intriguing melange of sexualities, social classes, races, and ethnicities in what, at first, seems to be a quirky if adequately “correct” discourse on Desire and Otherness. But the viewer is soon disabused of any such straightforward notion. Exotica is less concerned with the metonymical linearity of desire than it is with the deadly repetition of the drive. The characters in Exotica represent not so much a “society” as a random mix of individual subjects connected by nothing more meaningful than chance meetings and pure contingency. There is no underlying political or social signification to this community (Egoyan's multicultural casting underlines this), and yet everything functions normally, albeit in a mechanical, somnambulistic way. These characters have chosen private enjoyment over community, so that as “in film noir, privacy establishes itself as the rule, not as a clandestine exception” (Copjec, 1994).

In the first scene of Exotica a young customs inspector watches arriving passengers at the airport through a two-way mirror. While waiting for his luggage, Thomas (Don McKellar), a pet shop owner and smuggler