Secrets and Lies

I just watched Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies. Atom Egoyan is noted for his brainy films, where scenes are shown as a puzzle, the viewers invited to figure out why a particular haunting view is shown again and again.

Egoyan has a few themes he tends to explore. He's into, for lack of a better phrase, sexual deviancy. I use that hesistantly because Egoyan generally doesn't view these topics with disdain. He keeps the treatment subtle so people aren't outwardly offended, but I believe he wants us to say that our thoughts on these matters are too conservative.

In Ararat, there is a half-brother and half-sister that sleep with one another. In Next of Kin a supposed brother and sister have feelings for one another (turns out they are unrelated). In The Sweet Hereafter, a father and her daughter seem to have an incestuous relationship that is briefly mentioned, but never brought up again.

Egoyan also uses video in all his films. The video, to me, serves as a metaphor for human memory. Although people often treat video as an accurate depiction of reality, movies are essentially videos, and directors manipulate what we see. Even amateur filmmakers present a kind of reality just by deciding what or what won't be recorded.

Egoyan has been accused of creating chilly characters. At times, it's difficult to care about his characters because they seem so different, so hard to grasp. In Speaking Parts, a woman is fascinated by an actor, who, until recently, has had no speaking parts. He plays minor roles. She keeps renting videos from her video store of this man. The man happens to work at the same hotel as she does, cleaning rooms, though it seems they have either never met, or never known each other that well.

Another woman is interested in making a film about her dead brother. She finds that the same man working in the hotel resembles her brother. She insists on casting this man, and eventually has a relationship with the man (albeit, the earliest form of a kind of cybersex, more relevant now, than it was then).

Still, it's hard to associate with any of these three characters.

Since then, Egoyan has tried to create characters that people could relate to, and in the process, he seems to have lost some of the trickiness of his plotting.

Where the Truth Lies seems a bit like Velvet Goldmine, a film by Todd Haynes, starring Christian Bale as a reporter who wants to find out what happened to a singer, played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyer, who faked his own death. Rhys-Meyer plays Brian Slade, an enigmatic glam rock singer. Bale's character had attended the concert where this death was faked, and he's been curious ever since to figure out why Slade disappeared shortly after admitting it was a fake. It owes its plot very much to Citizen Kane where reporters want to know why Kane uttered the word "Rosebud" just before he died.

There's a woman reporter in the early 70s, who wants to know why Lanny Morris and Vince Collins (modeled after Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin) split up shortly after the death of Maureen O'Flaherty, a woman found dead in their hotel room.

Where the Truth Lies is perhaps Egoyan's sexiest film to date. Even Exotica wasn't really nearly as erotic, and deals more with a father's pain about his daughter, which he somehow deals with by going to a strip club. Yet, for my taste, it seems more conventional than a typical Egoyan film.

When the truth is finally revealed at the end, it's the kind of answer you'd expect from a more run-of-the-mill whodunit. As time goes by, Egoyan seems to have grown more skilled visually as a filmmaker. He's always been fond of moving the camera, almost like Hong Kong directors. Watch the way the camera moves in various scenes.

He films this like an older style movie with bright shimmery qualities.

Throughout the film, I was engrossed, wanting to know what would happen. Alas, I had scene the pivotal scene ahead of time (the one that rated it NC-17), which is, at least to me, surprisingly not that surprising. That didn't help because I knew what the revelation would be. But even had I not known, would that surprise be typical Egoyan?

Certainly, this film has him exploring other kinds of sexual contact. I get the sense that Egoyan, if he could, would make a far more subversive film if he could. He's doing it in such subtle ways because the film industry is not prepared for him to go as far as he wants to go.

For example, I think he really wants to explore incest much more fully than he has, where it has a significant meaning in the film. It's so fascinating a topic to him that you feel Egoyan must have been involved in such a relation himself.

The title is also intriguing. Originally, I read the title to mean "where the truth is buried", but you can also read it as "when the truth is a lie", which is paradoxical, and is perhaps the kind of double meaning he's looking for? It reminds me a little of the title of the album by Secret Machines, Now Here is Nowhere, which is a play on words. If you put, "Now Here" together, you get "Nowhere". But it could also be an insight. Effectively, to be right here, right now, is to be, in some weird sense, nowhere. OK, it doesn't make sense to me either, but I'm sure the idea seemed ubercool to the guys at Secret Machines.

The film's watchable and engrossing, but I don't think it's near his best efforts. For that, I give the film a B. Good, but not great.