57. Exotica

The video box suggests a Cinemax erotic thriller -- heaving bosoms and not much more. The setting is a strip bar where secret rendezvous and hidden desires boil over into obsession. Even the structure of Exotica emulates a striptease, peeling back layer after layer until a final climactic revelation. But it's all a bait-and-switch. Exotica has as much to do with the erotic as Better Homes and Gardens, instead weaving a hypnotic story of human pain and sad redemption.

Director Atom Egoyan distorts the timeline into a non-sequential pattern (much like Pulp Fiction a year earlier) which displays seemingly unrelated scenes that slowly tie closer and closer together. We meet a disparate set of characters, unconnected or at best linked only by the thinnest of threads: a smuggler of exotic bird eggs (Don McKellar) who frequents the ballet; a stripper (Mia Kirshner) specializing in naughty schoolgirl routines; a government auditor (Bruce Greenwood) with a strange fixation on her; the strip club's DJ (Elias Koteas), who seems to teeter on the edge of madness; and a young flute player (Sarah Polley), who babysits an empty house.

Egoyan plays tricks with our assumptions about these figures, painting them first as deviant, then tragic, then achingly sympathetic. The plasticity of the timeline cleverly draws us in, but rather than serve as a gimmick unto itself, it accentuates the characters' emotional catharsis -- connecting us to their pain and investing us in the outcome. As a technical exercise alone, Exotica would be tremendously entertaining, but its underlying story haunts and touches us in ways no mere technique ever could. Don't let the cheesy cover fool you; the film behind it is impossible to forget. (Rob Vaux)