Family Viewing

I'm still in my Atom Egoyan mood and catching up with some of his earlier films I hadn't been able to see. Although I didn't care for this film nearly enough, I did think it was a creative concept (something Egoyan excels at). My interest in these early films also has to do with his editing style and mixing which is quite exceptional and makes for a great visual experience (something Egoyan excels I recommend it for that if nothing else). His films will not appeal to everyone, but they are an exercise in indie filmmaking and taking chances as a visual storyteller.

This is one twisted family. The 18 year old son Van is involved with his father's live in lover, and his father's phone sex fantasy woman. The family's story is told as if it is all recorded on video and played back in no particular order. The story is very compelling, Van is especially endearing, but the movie is very strange. Still, I recommend it.

Van's father, Stan, is fond of video, always taping scenes of daily family life. But he does not take care of Van's grandmother, Armen. Although he could afford having her at home, she is spending her days watching TV in an old people's home.

At this point, I have seen almost all of the films of Atom Egoyan. This was definitely my least favorite. Not that it was horrible, and I have to give him some credit because he is clearly working with no budget... but this is just not the masterpiece that, say, "Exotica" is. Its clever concepts are bogged down by dull characters.

The lack of emotion from some characters, and questionable motives of others are quite interesting, but never fully realized.

"In the mode of a shoestring production, FAMILY VIEWING makes a good fist of probing the fundamentals of watching and being watched, all the scenes in Stan's condominium apartment are grainy, low-resolution home video footage that slowly unravels the insalubrious sides behind a closed door: Van's transgressive attachment with Sandra is semi-incestuous (Rose is charismatically affectionate to countervail the relationship's uncomfortable intimacy); Stan's sexual proclivity involves making home videos of his sex act and enacting phone sex with Rose through a third party (which is also Aline's avocation to earn extra money), the peculiar attention to unorthodox sexuality and social malaise has been one of the leitmotifs among his corpus, and here, Egoyan shows his acute acumen and felicity that leavens the narrative with strangely invoked aplomb and a knowingness that is devoid of neither mean-spirited judgements, nor simple sensationalization."

read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore, thanks

The breakthrough film by the most stylish and original critic of the audio/visual age is a sophisticated mock soap opera charting the corrosive influence of TV and video on the fabric of modern family life. With astonishing versatility and a grab-bag of black comic gestures, writer director Atom Egoyan injects an air of deadpan, dispassionate humor into a convoluted melodrama which is less kinky than it sounds: a young man, finding his family identity threatened, rescues some nostalgic home videos before his father can erase them with homemade S&M porn, and then 'kidnaps' his neglected grandmother from her nursing home with the help of a sympathetic woman who earns a living selling phone sex. The screenplay shows a tendency toward over plotting (which should be obvious from even this thumbnail synopsis), but Egoyan unravels the many narrative knots with a rare technical and creative dexterity that earned his film the honor of being the best Canadian film of the year.