Speaking Parts

Been in a mood to catch up with my Atom Egoyan and this is the first film! I a huge fan of this "out there" filmmaking and stories. They are never easy to categorize and he's just slightly more accessible than Lynch's films. This film leans heavy into style and film technique while presenting a film with complex and unusual characters. I really enjoyed this film but know that there are many out there who just want get into his style of films (especially his early and non-mainstream films).

Terrific. I hadn't seen any Egoyan films before, and I'd read some criticism that led me to expect it to be an incredibly depressing experience - but it wasn't; not at all. I really enjoyed his insistence on reminding you that you're watching a film & interest in how cameras affect human interaction..

Plus, for me there was a lot of humor in it! I don't think you should be worrying about whether it's appropriate to laugh at some scenes - I could hardly keep a straight face every time the goth boy/aspiring actor/hotel staffer was onscreen. Smart, witty, highly recommended.

As my first approach to Egoyan's films, I must say it was a great experience. The movie is about lonely people searching for something or someone, about the influence of media, about life. Its ambientation works excellent. Not an easy movie to see, though; but it's really an experience.

The celebrated Canadian/Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan again trains his voyeuristic gaze on the numbing influence of video technology, showing some of the ways it can be (mis)used to short circuit human emotions. Egoyan's typically oblique and (deliberately) disjointed story of psycho-sexual obsession follows two women, a passive, repressed hotel maid and a frustrated screenwriter, both infatuated with the very same obscure object of desire: a narcissistic gigolo/actor looking for his first 'speaking part'. The scenario is more than a little contrived (among other plot holes is a never accounted for corpse), but the patchy script is offset by the director's eye for imagery and by some of the deadpan ironies of his observations (a video morgue, safe sex via closed-circuit TV, and so forth). Egoyan was one of the first movie makers to locate the real connection between sex, lies, and videotape, but the impression left here is of a talented director capable of something much better.

Small aspects of this film seem a bit dated, but Egoyan makes up for it by being so astonishingly innovative with everything else. It's strange to think that lost among the sea of crap that is most 80s cinema, is this deeply idiosyncratic ode to alienation that predates so much that has been come to be taken for granted in international art cinema. David Lynch is the only other filmmaker in North America I can think of who was even close to doing films this interesting in the 80s. Steven Soderbergh pretty much owes "Sex, Lies, and Videotape", and thus his entire career, to having the balls to steal what Egoyan was doing, relatively unseen, at the time, and passing off his own watered-down version.