Adoration

Life looping around itself is a topic that fascinates Atom Egoyan. Coincidences and chance encounters are not used by him as means of advancing the plot but rather as ways of demonstrating how we are connected across time, space, generations and cultures. Often times his characters do not quite belong where they are found, and so they bring with them personal associations, sometimes secret ones. These private histories frequently reflect much larger truths about the world outside ourselves.

“Adoration”, revolves around one event or non-event. There is a report read about a woman who falls in love with someone from the Middle East; he says his family lives in Israel but I’m not sure if that’s true or not. She gets pregnant; he’s initially unhappy but later very happy about it they seem deeply in love. He wants her to fly to Bethlehem to meet his parents; he has to take a later flight for business reasons.

This sets off alarms in an age of terrorism just not for her. What happens with these people and their flight isn’t something I can tell right now; we only see them in flashbacks. More than one way that they could have met is presented by the story. The film shows other people in their lives before and after meeting them and also how those other people think about what they did or didn’t do.

Prejudice is buried under nationalism and religion here but this isn’t a message movie either: It’s about trying to get through emotional mazes, sometimes finding ourselves without knowing where they ar eor what really happened there or even how we feel about it (or why). Most films make things easy for us: protagonists know what they want, and we understand too.

Here there seems like an illusion that we’re feeling along with them. And the most important connection though not realized until much later is a high school drama teacher in Toronto named Sabine (Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife and muse), who reads a story from the air travel incident as a French exercise. Why that one? For understanding spoken French. And more…

A student named Simon (Devon Bostick) turns it into a first-person account, with his mother being pregnant woman and father treacherous fiancé. Simon’s parents are dead; he lives with Tom (Scott Speedman), his uncle. Sabine tells him to read it to class as if true an acting exercise, she says. It gets picked up in Internet chat rooms among Simon’s high school friends.

I don’t want to say what is real or imagined here, or anything about the secret connection Sabine has been hiding; but Egoyan sets up meetings between her and Tom in two rather brilliant sequences that keep us guessing even as they play out before our eyes, and shows flashbacks of the couple from Simon’s story and his actual parents, played by same actors, so reality takes on fuzzy meanings as it frequently does for him.

It aches with thoughts on terrorism, Israeli-Palestinian feelings, Muslims in Canada, and the Internet’s role in creating factoids that might as well be true. Statements are made about these things but none of them are completely resolved; the film refuses to deliver closure. There are only hints at some areas: the boy’s anger at his father, the telling of the original story to him, two deaths and whose fault they were.

Some people may be confused by this movie; I was fascinated. The trouble with reviewing an Egoyan film is that you wind up trying to describe a fragmented plot line and what characters (and we) might believe at one point and not another. This can lead to confusion or dissatisfaction. Still, it is clear how emotions are presented by the movie. Why does Egoyan make it so hard?

Because those are his people trapped inside it. Our lives consist of stories we tell ourselves about our lives. They can be based on truth but not necessarily so and perhaps should not always be so. If there weren’t a little rewriting allowed for where would one stand?

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