Speaking Parts (1989, Atom Egoyan) (Patreon)

76/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Sam Neill once made a documentary about New Zealand's film industry called Cinema of Unease, a title I'd shamelessly steal were I ever to write a book about Egoyan's early work. For me, this is his first "mature" film, in the sense that he'd fully synthesized what I think of as his core style; the opening sequence—a dialogue-free montage (Lisa: "There is nothing special about words") that introduces the three main characters in their various isolation bubbles, accompanied by Mychael Danna's anxious score—creates an entire hermetic world in roughly seven minutes, telling us virtually nothing concrete while instilling tremendous curiosity via pure jittery mood. (That last phrase kinda encapsulates my aesthetic preference, actually.) What follows is actually quite slippery, and perhaps not always entirely coherent—I struggle to find a thematic throughline connecting Lance's haunting (for Lisa) silent presence as a background extra in movies to Clara's frustration with the changes being made to her screenplay. You could say "enforced redefinition," maybe, but then I'm not sure how that fits into the film's primary thesis about the pitfalls of video mediation. (Although as I typed that sentence, a low-wattage lightbulb clicked on. Hmm.) In any case, Egoyan was way ahead of the curve regarding what was then our relatively nascent personal relationship with small screens, to the point where I had to remind myself, when Clara and Lance engage in what we now think of as Skype/Facetime sex, that another two decades (roughly) would pass before that became commonplace. It's not quite science fiction as depicted here, but neither is it that far removed.

Sudden, hilarious realization (you're getting more real-time cogitation than usual): Speaking Parts is an analog* version of the film that Men, Women & Children was ineptly trying to be. Not as sprawling, to be sure, and far less didactic...but there's still a moralistic aspect, which moves front and center in the very last shot. Can't say that I love that ending—it's a tad blunt for my taste—but I do love that Egoyan shoots Lisa touching Lance's face with maximum visual ambiguity, such that it almost looks as if her hand passes through him. Similarly, one of the videoconferencing scenes alternates between medium closeups in a way that deliberately inspires confusion about whether Lance and Clara are or aren't currently in the same room. Cross-cutting between simultaneous action throughout is masterful (especially the back and forth between Clara grilling Lance about the revised script—while we continuously see/hear his previous audition tape in the background—and Lisa's disastrously invasive interview with the bride)—and no other filmmaker this side of the avant-garde (possibly excepting Almereyda) has brought extremely low resolution to such dizzy heights. Those raster lines! The movie achieves its zenith, as it should, during the climax, which goes magnificently bugfuck. Egoyan would go on to make even greater films than this, but I now feel as if he's forever been struggling to top the creepily inexplicable moment in which Lisa enters room 106 and stares intently at the theoretical camera position of a scene she imagined in a movie that she'd previously watched dozens of times, her image seen by us via said purely theoretical camera. One of those early-Egoyan flourishes that I find overwhelming despite being unable to articulate the source of its emotional power. It's so great that I choose to ignore the epilogue.

* It was a sobering moment for me when, during one of the scenes set in After Dark Video (a real Toronto location, now obviously defunct), I suddenly realized that my sole previous viewing was so long ago that not only did video stores still exist, but DVDs did not yet exist. (Coincidentally, the first DVD I ever owned was The Sweet Hereafter. Though I already had a massive laserdisc collection.)