La Presse at the 74th Berlinale | The best Egoyan in 25 years

(BERLIN) Atom Egoyan did not seem happy with the question I asked him at a press conference on Thursday afternoon about the recurring theme of incest in his cinema. The subject was vaguely mentioned in Exoticaaddressed head-on in The Sweet Hereafterand he finds himself again at the heart of Seven Veilspresented yesterday at the Berlinale, after a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

“I’m not going to dwell on it, I’ve already talked about it, but as a teenager I witnessed first-hand – not in my family – an abusive relationship with a person who was very close to me . I have a very strong connection to this subject, as an observer,” said the Canadian filmmaker, before quickly moving on to the next issue. In hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t the best context to talk about incest. In my defense, the press conference was coming to an end and we had been beating around the bush since the beginning.

Seven Veils stars Amanda Seyfried as Jeanine, a theater director called upon to remount her mentor’s most famous work, the opera Salome, by Richard Strauss. The mentor, who recently passed away, was inspired in his staging by Jeanine’s relationship with a father who “loved her too much”, as Oscar Wilde suggested (in French in the text).

For what Salome ? a journalist asked Egoyan, this time happy to answer. “I first staged this production in 1996. I staged it seven times and when it was revived last year at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, I had the idea for this scenario. I immediately thought of Amanda, with whom I wanted to work again since Chloe (2009). »

Also, the opera that we see on the screen is inspired by the staging of Salome by Egoyan himself, scarred for life by the incest suffered by one of his friends. In short, everything is in everything, as Raôul Duguay would say. Even if it gets lost in a conceptual, cold and cerebral maze of literary references and mise en abyme, Seven Veils is Atom Egoyan’s most inspired, coherent and accomplished film in 25 years.

Evil tongues will say that the bar was not high. It pains me to admit it, Egoyan having been decisive in my journey as a young film buff, but it’s true. The Toronto filmmaker left his mark on cinema in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to daring proposals like Next of Kin, Family Viewing And Calendar, all presented at the Berlinale. “I owe a lot to this festival, I am always moved to be there and proud to have chaired the jury which awarded the Golden Bear 21 years ago to In this world [de Michael Winterbottom], a film that deals with the plight of refugees. »

The fact remains that in the last quarter of a century, Egoyan has become bogged down in a slump of more or less erotic and generally poorly put together psychological thrillers. He achieves it here. If it leaves some poorly defined characters in the lurch and fails to tie up all the strings, it stands out thanks to a particularly elegant production and a brilliantly structured reflection on art, desire, what inspires them and what follows from it.

Canada in Berlin

There is a strong Canadian presence at the Berlinale this year “When you look at our selection, with Meryam [Joobeur] and its two producers in competition with her first feature film, and at the other end of the spectrum, Atom Egoyan, from the next generation of women to the most experienced, it’s absolutely extraordinary,” notes Julie Roy, general director of Telefilm Canada, whose one of the mandates is to promote Canada abroad.

She was at the premiere of Like fire, by Philippe Lesage, Sunday evening, and that ofIntercepted, by Oksana Karpovych, in the afternoon. “She’s so eloquent!” I also met its two producers who were trained at INIS, says Julie Roy, whom I interviewed briefly this week at the Berlinale. In addition, there are our two jurors, Denis Côté and Andréa Picard [programmatrice du TIFF membre du jury du meilleur premier long métrage]. I tell myself that there is something that works in our international aspect. »