odd choices
by
Douglas Messerli
Atom
Egoyan (screenplay and director) Guest of Honour / 2019, USA 2020
Boy
did film critics quite literally chew up Egyptian-born Canadian director Atom
Egoyan’s most recent movie, Guest of Honor. Yes, Egoyan has in recent
years fell into a kind of story-telling rut, and given the highly moral texture
of most of his films, he has always been a bit sanctimonious in his exploration
of guilt and innocence, including in one of his best works, The Sweet
Hereafter.
Yet to describe his most recent characters
as “ludicrous,” as Variety reviewer Guy Lodge did, or write as The
New York Times critic Ben Kenigsberg that the film’s “core revelations are
pretty silly, failing crucial tests of motivation” seems terribly unforgiving
of the highly intelligent cinema-maker who, like so many other film directors
before him, has suffered a short period of diminished results.
I’m far more sympathetic of this flawed
film, agreeing with Glenn Kenny’s comments on RogerEbert.com in which he
describes the movie as “a gratifyingly solid work that benefits from first-rate
performers.”
The priest is required to be both a kind
of confessor to a woman who has never previously crossed the vestibule of his
church and also a kind of lay psychologist, particularly when he attempts to
explore the reasons why Veronica has insisted on serving a sentence for child
abuse while teaching music and conducting an orchestra in a local school—a
crime for which she herself as well as the student she is charged with having
abused, admit she did not commit. It takes almost the entire film, laid out in
a series of interwoven flashbacks, to reveal her near saintly self-sacrifice.
Perhaps like the Catholic canonized St. Veronica, she is offering up the vision
of her childhood crime in reparation for her own past sacrilege and blasphemy.
What we do come to perceive in her
encounter with Wilson’s character, played very much against type, is that the
director is purposely withholding information which might long-ago have
relieved some of his confessor’s guilt: that he has indeed known a great deal
more about this case that he has at first pretended. But it order to explain
that, I shall have to break through—dear reader, I’m warning you—a great deal
of the webs of narrative Egoyan has woven around this late-revealed truth.
Let us simply generalize at first:
Veronica’s father, Jim (an excellent David Thewlis) is desperately in love with
his daughter’s Brazilian-born mother, but as she grows seriously ill, soon
after dying, he becomes involved—at least as the young Veronica (Isabelle
Franca) perceives it, reminding us a little of Henry James’ novel What
Maisie Knew—with her piano teacher, at one point allowing her to hold his
hand at Veronica’s piano recital while he is sitting next to her ailing mother
and on several occasions both of them retreating during Veronica’s lessons for liaisons
elsewhere in the house.
A child’s knowledge can be an intense experience,
particularly when what she believes is a truth that stands firmly against the
moral precepts she has been taught by both father and mother. For Veronica, appalled
by what she believes she witnessed and, accordingly, now repulsed by her
beautiful teacher, watches passively, soon after as her mentor, smoking a
cigarette whose ashes fall to the couch on which she is about to nap, is later consumed
by a resultant fire.
Worse yet, as Veronica grows up, dating a
boy which, if I am correct (it’s hard to know in such knotted plot territory)
the teacher’s son Walter (Gage Munroe), Veronica, to help expunge her childhood
guilt, tells the young man of her childhood refusal to act, after which he determines
to and succeeds in committing suicide by drowning. It’s almost inevitable,
accordingly, that her refusal both times to circumvent death finally is
repeated in her refusal to defend herself—despite the clear evidence that the
cell-phone proposal to meet up for sex with her young male student was sent at
a time when she was conducting her orchestra in which that student also performed.
Father Greg finally reveals his bombshell
that Veronica’s childhood teacher was an active member of his congregation, and
had confessed to him her relationship with Veronica’s father— more of a needed
friendship than a series of sexual trysts—which had been sought out and
approved by the young girl’s dying mother.
And that’s just Veronica’s side of the
story. Her food inspector British expatriate father, as Veronica puts it, also
made “several odd choices.” A true authoritarian when it comes to the rules of
the food health board, both on and off the job, Jim can be both callous and
forgiving about the restaurant negligence he uncovers.
He is happy to award a new Persian
restaurant with the health board’s highest rating, while being rather callous
when he proposes to close down a long-established Italian restaurant wherein he
has discovered a dead rat.
At an Armenian establishment he discovers
an obvious dereliction of the rules, a pile of dead rabbits, with their ears
lobbed off, in the kitchen. Not only has the restaurant traded in unprocessed
food—source unknown—but is cutting off their ears for another restaurant who
serves the delicacy of fried rabbit ears. It probably doesn’t help that Jim has
purchased a live rabbit for his daughter when she was a child, and is now diligently
caring for Benjamin the rabbit while she is imprisoned.
However, when the proprietor (played by
Egoyan’s wife Arsinée
Khanjian) begs him not to write her restaurant up, revealing that the rabbits
are for a private party, not for regular customers, and that, if he wants, she
will keep the ears and serve them up as a delicacy to the party itself, he overlooks
that restaurant’s transgressions.
In a sense, Clive’s proof of his daughter’s
innocence now leaves him without a role in her life; she has, in her demand to
serve out an undeserved punishment, left him in the dark. Indeed, Jim is a man
who, except for his awards and admonishments has had no one truly and deeply to
live for since the death of his wife. As unloved as he is by the restauranteurs
he encounters, so, does he come finally to realize, is he is now being ignored
by his Veronica.
Yet,
at another point the respected inspector becomes a kind of criminal himself,
grinding up rabbit feces to make them appear to be rat pellets which he
sprinkles on the bathroom floor of an otherwise spotless German restaurant in
which he has just pleasantly dined, using the evidence as a kind of bribe so
that he may interview the owner’s young relative who also works there, Clive
(Alexandre Bourgeois), the 17-year-old student who Veronica is accused of
having abused.
Despite his anger over being used (and one
might argue, truly abused) in this situation, and knowing that just a few
moments before the inspector had entered the toilet that he himself had washed
the bathroom floor, Clive, nonetheless, confirms that Veronica was conducting
at the very time she was said to have sent the cell-phone, suggesting that the
message must have been sent instead by the bus driver, at the time supposedly
protecting all the student’s cell-phones.
Invited to the party at the Armenian
restaurant, he is asked to say a few words to the guests. Having already drunk
too much, Jim embarrassingly babbles on, suddenly imagining himself as the “guest
of honour,” a role he has never previously played in his life. His final words,
that he will seek out the guilty bus driver and revenge his daughter’s imprisonment,
not only shocks his audience, however, but results in a visit from police
detectives the next morning.
As they begin to interrogate him, he
suddenly perceives that his daughter’s long-lived rabbit has died. He returns
to the Armenian restaurant, dead rabbit in hand, to ask them one last favor, to
lob off the animal’s feet so that he might have the symbols they culturally
represent of good luck, knowing, at the same time, that any luck in love or
emotional caring has eluded him forever.
Los
Angeles, July 15, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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