Directed By Atom Egoyan
Starring – Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith
The Plot – Jeanine (Seyfried), an earnest theatre director, has been given the task of remounting her former mentor’s most famous work, the opera Salome. Haunted by dark and disturbing memories from her past, she allows her repressed trauma to color the present as she re-enters the opera world after so many years away.
This film is currently not rated
POSITIVES
Based on his time directing the stage play of “Salome”, to essentially begin his career, there’s a real Cathartic appeal to Egoyan’s undertaking here that, like Jeanine’s own return to direct the stage play inside of the fictional narrative, feels like art imitating life, and it’s an opportunity that Egoyan doesn’t let slip away, especially towards supplanting some endearing social commentary and stylistic impulses that at the very least make this a fascinating watch. On the stimulating style, Egoyan’s evocative imagery lend themselves seamlessly to the dimensions within this story, especially as the meat of Jeanine’s own arc starts to open up, and parallel the very beats of Salome’s own unrequited love, perhaps as the proverbial key towards unlocking the psychological duress of Jeanine’s tortured history. Egoyan not only reserves meticulous editing in the ideal of audiences studying the lingering faces of these characters during some hotly tense and contested interactions, but also towards building the suspense and anticipation factors within the developments of the production of the play within the film, which feel like they could snap Jeanine’s control over her everyday reality at any given moment. Between this and Egoyan’s visual impulses taking several chances in conveying the unearthing of tortured memories, with overlapping and intentionally streaky imagery that ride the waves of repression in the mind of their captor, he continuously conveys that there’s always something deeper and more personal at play with Jeanine than simply just the directional ways that she approaches giving insight and constructive criticism to her cast, and while these broad strokes may feel distracting to some audiences looking for a straight and unblemished approach to everything from sexual harassment and industry gaslighting, they accurately register Jeanine’s foggy memory towards uncovering them better than storytelling ever could, with these elaborately surreal sequences feeling the darkest and deepest depths of the subconscious that blend mesmerizingly with the original compositions from Egoyan’s version of the “Salome” stage show, which are inspired here with overwhelming volume that makes them feel unshakeable. As for the script, it’s conflicted like most of Egoyan’s films, but where it worked for me personally was in the insight towards creation that only people in control could effectively convey. While “Seven Veils” is clearly a drama-first categorization, the film is blessed by some caustically dry and passive aggressive observations into humorous responses that score the heft of responsibility as good or better than any film about artistry as I’ve ever seen, all the while capably corresponding to Jeanine’s sense of established isolation in her character outline that is brandished by some meaningfully layered and expressive overhead narration by Seyfried. If her continuous commentary over the film was simply just echoing what we the audience are experiencing with the imagery, then it would feel unnecessarily restrictive and even convoluted, but because Jeanine is often at conflict with everyone involved in her production, the accessibility of this open window to the soul goes a long way towards defining both the toxic passion and unresolved trauma that have come to define her, perhaps as an undisclosed opportunity for Egoyan to unload some tender feelings of his own during some problematically conflicting productions of his own career. In addition to these valuable contributions to the film’s integrity, Amanda Seyfried gives one of the most dramatically gripping performances of her career, with a subtlety to emotional transformation to Jeanine that continuously unnerves without feeling unrelenting. Because of such, Seyfried’s grandest moments involve those long-winded diatribes in dialogue, where Egoyan relaxes the editing in order for her passion and intensity to overwhelm and influence those surrounding her, and while it would be effortless for Seyfried to become unglued with the ghosts of her character’s past that frequently come back to haunt her, Amanda’s ability to convey fear, anger, remorse and gratitude almost simultaneously go a lot further towards garnering an unblemished empathy for the character, with these long and lingering facial registries to the camera’s invasiveness that Amanda cerebrally utilizes to communicate that something deeper persists than the lack of honesty she affords interacting characters.
NEGATIVES
Like other Atom Egoyan films, subtlety is never this movie’s strongest or most admirable quality, as an overly revealing sequences during its opening act takes away most of the intrigue and ambiguity with Jeanine’s past, leaving too many of its long-term questions inside of a 102-minute run time feeling like they were answered far too quickly and abrupt to feel satisfying during a climactic reveal later. One such example pertains to a dissolution within Jeanine’s marriage that is framed and captured so forcefully that it might as well include characters winking and nodding towards her, whenever they share the screen with one another, and while this might’ve been intentional by Egoyan to immediately convey intimate disconnect in the depths of his protagonist, I feel like there were more fascinating means of giving this away meticulously, instead of one five minute scene that basically summarizes everything with the most obvious and evidential framing to a scene that practically spells it out to an audience too obtuse to recognize the spoon-fed signs. In addition to this, the story’s quality noticeably diminishes, each time that Jeanine deviates away from the focus of the narrative, with none of the other characters even coming close to Seyfried’s on-screen presence that drives so much of its tension and unnerving consciousness. One such deviation involves Rebecca Liddiard’s character sexually harassed and humiliated within an industry begging her to suppress the need to go public, and while Liddiard’s performance is great towards riding a morale ambiguity that drives the audience towards debating if it was all pre-meditated from her, this all happening under the watchful eye of Jeanine’s production, without her knowledge or inclusion, makes it feel like a secondary subplot in a movie not interested enough to focus on it faithfully for the long-term, with the results leading to strained pacing that make the film feel every inch of its maximized run time. Finally, despite the script continuously building some palpable tension and momentum for itself in the confines of a production that seems to casually slip away from the grip of Jeanine, the climactic blow-off during the film’s final twenty minutes feels practically non-existent, particularly in the abundance of stakes that it crafted for itself while the walls were tumbling down, which never quite came to fruition during a neatly resolved final few moments of the film. Despite the worlds of fiction and reality meeting at a crossroads collision, the film lacks any kind of exclamation point that made Darren Aronofsky films a cinematic force to be reckoned with, and the closing moments essentially feel like an afterthought to conflicts filled with dramatic layering, closing out such an important film pertaining to sexual assault and abuse within the industry on such a forgettable whimper that nearly compromised everything built before it.
OVERALL
“Seven Veils” proves that Atom Egoyan still doesn’t value subtlety in the exploration of his meaty themes, however it’s nevertheless a visually striking and personally cathartic exploration for the thirty-year director, capped off by one impeccably layered performance from Amanda Seyfried. While the film is certainly the best from Egoyan in decades, it’s greatly strained by a script that creatively bites off more than it can capably chew, resulting in a fascinating concept with lackadaisical execution that damns this stage show into stage fright during its most defining moments.
My Grade: 6.9 or C