True lies

Atom Egoyan returns to familiar
themes with Adoration

TECHNOLOGY-INFUSED TALE: Adoration

by MATTHEW HAYS

Given Atom Egoyan’s penchant for all things cold and technological, it seems the Internet was practically invented just to fit into one of his movies. And after looking back, with his oft-dismissed 2005 big-budget entry Where the Truth Lies, the Toronto-based director has returned to familiar themes and wound them up in the World Wide Web.

“My son is now 15,” says Egoyan. “And I thought back to the time when I was that age, and all I wanted to do was travel, and I was also fascinated by the theatre. And I wondered about what I’d be doing today at that age. Of course, I realized I would be using the new technologies to tell stories in any way I could.”

The result is Adoration, another Egoyan feature that provides a meditation on technology and truth. Here, a French teacher asks a group of teens to translate an article about a terrorist who planted a bomb in his pregnant girlfriend’s baggage so he could take down a plane. One teen (Devon Bostick) finds twisted inspiration in the tale, and begins to spin his own stories about his parents and how they died. Chatting online about his new family mythology, it becomes increasingly difficult for those around him (and the audience) to determine precisely where the truth lies.

“When you suppress a narrative, you distort it,” Egoyan says. “And clearly, a lot of this work is deeply personal. When you start writing, your own family history emerges. You take aspects of your own life and they evolve into the world of metaphor. All families have these stories, they have their own mythologies.”

Adoration will please Egoyan-philes, who will immediately see many of his typical quirks, obsessions and stylistic flourishes (including another role for his wife, Arsinée Khanjian). Does he worry about repeating himself? “I think one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t necessarily have to come up with something entirely new every time. Where the Truth Lies was about media as well, just in another time. My last few films have been takes on genres. I feel like Adoration is very much like those films, but it’s not genre-based.

“I wanted to make a film that was coming from my own particular imagination. It’s definitely a film no one else could have made. I guess I’m working in the European art tradition, which is different from the North American tradition, where film purports to represent realism. In a sense that makes this film a little out of its time.”

When asked if there is one filmmaker who really inspired him, his answer is perhaps not surprising. Egoyan says that Alain Resnais—a director famous for creating cryptic narrative puzzles and no easy answers—has been especially stimulating.

But since Adoration came out, Egoyan is now returning to bigger budgets once more. He has just wrapped shooting Chloe in Toronto, a Robert Lantos-backed feature starring Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore. Late last year he was also given the Douglas Sirk Award in Hamburg for his body of work, a prize named for one of Germany’s greatest filmmakers.

“That really was a great honour,” says Egoyan.

ADORATION OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, MAY 8