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Directed by Atom Egoyan
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ADORATION The
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan never makes it easy
for us. In 1997 he made the
brilliant film “The Sweet Hereafter,” in which a small
town’s school kids are in a school bus that goes off the road at a
slick patch of ice, down a hill and into an ice-covered lake, where it
settles slowly and sinks to the bottom, killing all the children. As bad as that is, Egoyan
is interested more in the reactions of the town, as it loses its next
generation – poof, like that! – in the
kind of accident no one could be prepared for. There’s even more to the film
than that, including incest and a lawsuit, but the genius of Egoyan is that he raises questions that have no easy
answers, and that is what makes his films so powerful. Once
again, in his new film “Adoration,” he is concerned with
questions that seem not to have any answers. A boy, Simon, in French class in
Toronto hears of something that happened – in reality – a few
years ago. A Jordanian terrorist took his pregnant
Irish girlfriend to visit his family in Israel, but at the last minute he
asked her to go alone and he would join her in a couple of days. He had planted in her bag a bomb that
would have destroyed the El Al airliner in the air
and killed 380 people. The
Israeli security agents found the bag and arrested the bomber. Now
the boy, whose own parents were killed in an auto accident 8 years ago, lives
with his uncle Tom, the mother’s brother (played by Scott Speedman), who’s despised by the grandfather for
not making more of himself (he runs a tow truck). Encouraged by his French and drama
teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian,
the brilliant Lebanese actress and Egoyan’s
wife and muse) he presents the story to his class as something that really
happened – that his mother was pregnant with him and in love with her
fiancé at the time, who was according to his story the bomber. His
classmates are shocked by it, and soon the teen chat-rooms are buzzing with
all kinds of comments. At
the same time a strange Muslim woman comes to visit Tom and Simon on
Christmas Eve. What can she
want? And what of the real life
of Simon’s parents? His
mother was a violinist, his father a luthier who
meets her even though married, when he puts a new scroll on her violin. The
film is bursting with incidents, including a visit by Simon to his dying
grandfather, and a strange confrontation between Sabine and Tom. But I don’t want to give away
any more of the plot. You will
have to see “Adoration” for yourself; it is well worth it. |