Director: Atom Egoyan
Writers: Atom Egoyan
Stars: Amanda Seyfried, Douglas Smith, Rebecca Liddiard
Synopsis: An earnest theater director has the task of remounting her former mentor’s most famous work, the opera Salome. Some disturbing memories from her past will allow her repressed trauma to color the present.
At first, Seven Veils is impenetrable. Seven Veils is a complicated film. There is a wall between audience and narrative. That wall is intentional as the narrative needs it to be there to chip away slowly and methodically at the answers to many of the questions posed. The wall falls as Jeanine’s (Amanda Seyfried) memories about her previous experience with this production of the opera “Salome” and the trauma of her childhood is revealed.
As it plays on the screen, the script is near inaccessible. The script, written by director Atom Egoyan, would work better if more concrete details had been made clear. The characters, the dialogue, and the images always skirt around the truth. It’s like a whirlpool that never actually sucks us in. We circle closer and closer, but we never go completely down. It makes the revelations that do come more satisfying that we weren’t spoonfed any answers, but with that satisfaction comes more confusion as other questions are raised.
The layers of Egoyan’s script are sometimes played all at once and out of linear order. There are shifts to the voice over narration that are sometimes meant to be apt quotes from the original play, “Salome” by Oscar Wilde, sometimes meant to be Jeanine’s essay that was meant to accompany the program, sometimes meant to be a part of the video journal she’s making for the show’s website, and sometimes are meant to be direct addresses to Charles, her former mentor who died and stipulated to his loved ones that Jeanine remount his most famous production. The ebb and flow of these is strange, and cacophonous at times, bits of narration add to the confusion about what the film is trying to say. It’s similar to the dissonance of when the diegetic music from the “Salome” opera is mixed with Mychael Danna’s non-diegetic score.
The muddiness of the script never interferes with the heavy feelings of dread we can sense in each scene. Egoyan’s long time collaborator, cinematographer Paul Sarossy, uses digital photography to achieve a sharpness to the picture that evokes danger and heightens our sense of fight or flight. There is one scene in particular very early on that means nothing to us then, but everything to us at the end.
Jeanine is making her way through various aspects of the production until she comes to a team working on the projection of a visual element that shows a young girl, highlighted in a golden yellow, walking through a black and white forest. Jeanine steps forward to watch the clip as it’s put together and as she turns, her body casts a shadow on the screen and the overlay image of the forest plays on her face while her shadow contains the little girl. It’s a spectacular use of visual imagery to convey the inner mind of a character.
As the film progresses, we see the trauma Jeanine has endured, first at the hands of her abusive father (Ryan McDonald) and then as her deepest horrors are used by the man she loved, Charles, to imbue his vision with more of an edge. The beauty of Amanda Seyfried’s performance is that she understands Jeanine’s pain so well that with a flick of her incredibly expressive eyes, she can call the deepest emotions needed for a scene. Seyfried has built a performance that exceeds the parameters in the script and speaks more volumes than the words ever could. It’s Seyfried’s performance that keeps the film watchable.
The complicated nature of the main plot, not to mention the subplot, eventually lead to a pretty good idea of what the film means. Or, really, what we hope it means. Atom Egoyan has little interest in giving us more than the barest of details to figure out everything Seven Veils is trying to say. It’s a film you’ll continue to think about and puzzle over. It’s a film that has a visual style that sticks in your mind and rattles about as you attempt to solve it. In many ways, Seven Veils is stunning, but the inaccessibility of the script leaves much to be desired and too much to be irritatingly pondered to be truly enjoyable.
