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There’s a turning point when Felicia’s Journey becomes a completely different movie from the one you’ve been watching, and if you’re unfamiliar with William Trevor’s 1994 novel upon which the film is based, it makes your back stiffen with alarm. It is, satisfyingly, a very Atom Egoyan moment: The film image of unwed teenage mother Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) recounting her woes in the passenger’s seat of the car that belongs to do-gooding widower Mr. Hilditch (Bob Hoskins) becomes a video image, and we understand suddenly not only that he has been watching her in a very detached, manipulative manner, but that she is as disposable to him as the technology he uses to record the life stories of all his “lost girls.” Before Felicia, they have been mostly prostitutes, young women Hilditch has lured into the comfort and protection of his lonely world and then murdered.
People collecting and altering the memories — and, thus, the reality — of their lives, especially through video, is a dominant theme of the 39-year-old Toronto-based writer-director. From the beginning, Egoyan has been obsessed with these possibilities onscreen: In his 1984 debut Next of Kin, a bored young Canadian assumes the identity of an Armenian family’s lost son after studying videotaped pleas from them. His 1987 follow-up, Family Viewing, depicted a callous father who tapes smutty sex acts over home movies of his ex-wife and estranged son in order to forget his past.
Fast-forward to Felicia’s Journey, Egoyan’s eighth feature and second consecutive literary adaptation, and you have the central character of Mr. Hilditch, an industrial cafeteria manager who compulsively relives his childhood via 1950s cooking shows featuring his mother Gala (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife and frequent onscreen collaborator), a glamorous and fussy French chef. The relationship between these grainy black-and-white video images and those of the murder victims he collects is never spelled out, although Hoskins’ lyrically subdued performance allows you to read reams of text in his haunted eyes. Egoyan notes that his filmmaking style involves a certain hoarding and obsessing too, on both his part and his audience’s.
“With all my films, people tend to have a different relationship with the images,” the cheerful Canadian auteur says by telephone. “If they like my movies, they almost feel protective. An interesting response I’ve gotten frequently is people saying they’re ‘worried’ about how other people will react. They really appreciated it, but they don’t necessarily run out and tell their friends to go see it, because they’re afraid the friends won’t see what they see, or just won’t ‘get it.'” He laughs. “Actually, some people worry about it more than they should.”
The novelist Russell Banks, whose book The Sweet Hereafter became the director’s previous and most famous Stateside feature, has called the films of Atom Egoyan “interactive.” That’s a better description than “stream-of-consciousness” to express the way Egoyan’s movies alternate times and places constantly and set up a revolving series of weird images that seem to have nothing to do with the main narrative — the eerie Piped Piper motif (Egoyan’s idea, not Banks’) that runs throughout The Sweet Hereafter, or the scenes of a nighttime search for a body that recur in 1994’s Exotica, a film about the revenge a tax auditor and a gay pet-shop owner exact on an exotic dancer.
But this is not auteurist sloppiness doubling as profundity: Egoyan rarely leaves an image or scene without significance to a character’s past. That’s the “interactive” part of his movies, the way the viewer must collect the seemingly disconnected visuals he throws almost nonstop at them. But they inevitably all fit together to create a portrait of individuals with mild façades and violent minds. In this sense, the fretful, pudgy serial killer Mr. Hilditch in Felicia’s Journey seems as perfect an Egoyan creation as that of Irish novelist William Trevor. Both were determined to put his inhuman acts into a human context, because to them, it’s a more terrifying truth.
“I’ve had people come up to me after screenings and ask, ‘Is it OK to have sympathy for Mr. Hilditch?'” Egoyan says. “That wasn’t my intention. I wanted to show a man who’s in complete denial about the evil of his actions. That’s why we never filmed any of the killings, because this is a man who would blot out the violence of that. If you were to read about the discovery of all these bodies on the grounds of a big old house where a lonely man lived, the portrait that would emerge is of a complete monster. But it’s important to realize that Mr. Hilditch doesn’t think he’s a monster, and that’s what makes him so dangerous. It would be a tonal disaster for the film to view him as any different than he sees himself. And as far as the sympathy part, well, I like to think I respect audiences enough to let them come to their own conclusions about how they should feel. I don’t want to slam any door shut.”
One small but significant difference between Trevor’s novel and Egoyan’s film involves Hilditch’s relationship with his celebrity-chef mother. In the book, there is a short reference to the fact that Gala turns to her fat, introverted adolescent son for sex when she has begun to gain weight and no longer feels attractive. In the movie, there’s barely a whiff of incest, which Egoyan calls “an awfully cliché plot device in contemporary movies” (and one that is pivotal, it should be noted, in The Sweet Hereafter). In an icy comic performance, Arsinée Khanjian essays Gala as perhaps too attentive and controlling of her boy (played by Danny Turner), but hardly predatory. Some might call Trevor’s revelation the missing link between Hilditch’s homicidal preoccupation with video-documenting his “lost girls” and his reverent reviewings of his mother’s TV show. But for Egoyan, the omission was necessary.
“On film, the incest angle is thunderingly reductive,” he says. “It’s all people would zero in on. And it blames the mother. What I think is more chilling is the idea that Hilditch has taken these old tapes and reinvented her. Based on the research I did, it’s generally not thought that serial killers are created by their upbringings. It’s more mysterious than that.”
“Mystery” is a word Egoyan uses often while discussing his movies, and it’s perhaps the best noun to capture the way they’re often so quiet and antiseptically pretty on the surface (the way The Sweet Hereafter used great fields and flurries of Canadian white, Felicia’s Journey glows with the green Irish hills of the title character’s memory) but make you feel uncertain — not quite sad and not quite happy, but anxious to think about the images again and again to pin down the quality of that feeling. It’s why Atom Egoyan thinks the medium of film is especially appropriate to explore his favorite theme: memory.
“Memory is life,” Egoyan insists. “Everything we do right now or are planning to do is based on what we’ve done before and how we feel about it. Film is a great medium, because it’s all about that marriage of ephemerality and emotion. When we watch a movie, we’re responding to other people’s reconstructed memories, and at the same time we’re assessing and reconstructing our own memories based on our reactions. It’s an endless cycle involving illusion and control. Film itself is an illusion of reality, and so is memory, but you can’t separate the illusion of memory from the reality of experience.” He pauses to take a breath, and laughs a little at himself. “Does that make sense?”
