Truth is blurred in Adoration
Tom (Scott Speedman, left) looks on as his nephew Simon (Devon Bostick) and Simon’s teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) figure out what to do about Simon’s fictional portrayal of what happened to his parents.
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For a high school French assignment, a student weaves his family history into a story about terrorism, and involves an Internet audience in the resulting controversy.
This latest offering by the Vernon Film Society is by critically-acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Ararat) who has won no less than four awards at the Cannes Film Festival.
Simon’s teacher reads an article to the class about an attempted aircraft bombing by a man who put explosives in his pregnant wife’s luggage. Simon decides to translate the story from the perspective of the unborn child, and his teacher encourages Simon to develop his story as a drama exercise.
However, he presents it to the class as if he really was the child his father would have killed. And when he uploads the story to the Internet, it has an impact he never imagined.
Friends and strangers respond. Even the actual survivors of the botched bombing attempt are drawn into his story.
The film shifts back and forth both in time. Simon’s real memories of his parents are juxtaposed against his imagined history as the child in the story. In both versions the parents are played by the same actors, leaving us to figure what’s real and what’s not.
The imaginary scenes were shot with a long lens, giving them a soft, dreamy air that visually separates them from scenes in the present.
The use of music is also significant.
In the story, Simon’s mother is a violinist, and his parents meet when she brings her violin in for repair. The composer, Mychael Danna (who scored Egoyan’s previous films, as well as Little Miss Sunshine and Monsoon Wedding), uses violin music extensively, adding to the film’s emotional depth.
Whereas The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief at a community level (following a tragic school bus accident), Adoration deals with grief and loss on a more personal level.
It also blends ideas about the subjective nature of reality in this technological age.
By re-inventing his own story, Simon can work through his own doubts about the death of his parents, including secrets he doesn’t understand about the family history. But he doesn’t stop to consider the greater impact this masquerade might have on others.
Eventually his story takes a twist that involves all the other characters in his life, culminating in the piecing together of a fragmented past that needed to be re-examined.
Simon’s fable evokes the nature of the Internet as a whole. People can create personas based on who they want to be, rather than who they actually are. They can disengage emotionally in their interactions with others in ways they never could when face-to-face.
While Egoyan doesn’t out-and-out criticise technology in this film, he does question whether the Internet takes the humanity out of human interaction when people use public spaces to deal with private issues.
In a world where we reinvent and broadcast ourselves via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person –– or even ourselves?
The critical divide on Adoration will mostly be between those who love Egoyan’s work and those who don’t. (Some find him obtuse and overly intellectual. He has a reputation for taking chances with his films.) But his unique way of examining the mundane, then linking it to larger issues, is seen to work very well here.
Adoration screens at the Vernon Towne Cinema Monday, Sept. 28 at 5:15 and 7:45 p.m. Advance tickets are available at The Bean Scene and the theatre.
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