Review: TIFF 2023: Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils is operatic look at morally dubious territory

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Seven Veils emerges as a film about appropriation – not cultural but personal, the morally dubious territory in which the artist takes your trauma and spins it into gold

Film and opera director Atom Egoyan has called the Dance of the Seven Veils “the most famous striptease in history.” Can the story of Salomé, King Herod and John the Baptist ever be reclaimed from the male gaze?

Jeanine is an obscure theatre director asked to remount her late mentor’s production of Salomé at a big-city opera house. She takes on the task with diffidence but clarity: When she was a child her father had obsessively filmed her performance in theatrical trust exercises; years later, when she was the 20-year-old protegé and lover of the unseen opera director Charles, he had used that creepy paternal relationship as the basis for his abused Salomé.

As is often the case with Egoyan, a stronger director of images than actors, the flattened performance style he favours can make the less experienced seem wooden rather than expressionistic . As a slightly creepy podcaster interviewing Jeanine, Joey Klein neatly captures the note of awkwardness in their quiet interchange while Douglas Smith, as an understudy who has a crush on her, is left mooning about like some miserable Shakespearean swain.

 

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