In last week’s movie review, of British film Shank, I commented on the fact that the young people in the film are great self-documentarians: they use their cellphone cameras constantly to record their own activities, from sex to violence.
It’s as though they are so media-saturated, so used to the presentation of life through recorded images, that they need such image-generating gadgetry to help construct their sense of themselves.
This isn’t a very far-fetched idea. Many of us — even people over 40 — are familiar with the way “social media” such as Facebook combine image and (a few) words to provide users with new modes of self-presentation. This is just the most obvious and public instance of such visual media, but it’s not a long way from showing friends your photographs — and that in turn is descended from the practice of writing letters. But it could be argued, in line with Camille Paglia’s view that we are experiencing a return of the repressed, the visual is now replacing the written as the primary means by which many of us extend our presence into the world.
A situation similar to that in Shank occurs in Atom Egoyan’s new film, Adoration. The Canadian writer-director (of Armenian descent) has long had an interest in film’s own mechanisms, so it’s not unusual to find a film-within-a-film in one of his movies. Such parallel mini-movies comment not only on the relevant movie as a whole, and the way movies allow us to see the world and ourselves, but they also ask questions about how we construct narratives about and for ourselves.
In Adoration, a young man is using his cellphone camera (as well as the discussion groups of the internet) to tell a story about his family history. Sparked by a piece read out by his French teacher (Arsinée Khanjian), in which a terrorist uses his pregnant fiancée as a bomb mule, Simon (Devon Bostick) begins to develop a story around these people, placing himself as a key figure in that scenario. His story is so powerful that a range of responses come flooding in — from his friends, people who have some knowledge of the bomb and the plane, his family, and others. As the whole thing explodes, questions of what really happened, and whether fiction can illuminate fact, arise.
While developing this powerful and controversial narrative, Simon is trying to investigate the elements of the story that relate to him and his background. He records his dying grandfather’s views on the matter on his cellphone, and these images recur in the film. Just as his bomb narrative is part of his self-discovery, and the internet discussion groups are a way of investigating what all this storytelling means communally, Simon’s cellphone mini-movie is a kind of documentary he’s making about himself, his world and his history.
If that all sounds like a rather dry set of premises and narrative devices, Adoration certainly doesn’t play out that way. Egoyan is so good at a layered narrative that he is able to tell such a story (or collection of stories) in the most subtle, teasing and engrossing way. His skill with flashbacks, or rather with telling a complex tale in a non-linear way, is a joy to watch. Other filmmakers may worry about whether a flashback, traditionally a key moment of revelation, is in the right place or doing its work properly, but for Egoyan it’s like everything is a flashback.
Our narratives are embedded in memory, and memory is with us all the time — it doesn’t necessarily just pop up at an appropriate moment like a well-placed flashback. In a way, memory (and/or fantasy, imagination and storytelling) is where we live, and we move seamlessly between that space and the present moment; or perhaps it’s simply that memory is an eternal present.
Adoration is also beautifully filmed and is centred on performances of depth and exquisitely transmitted emotion, without any grandstanding or scenery-chewing. Bostick and Khanjian do exemplary work, as does Scott Speedman as Simon’s often taciturn uncle. (One appreciates Speedman’s solid efforts in pulp such as Underworld, but here he indicates how much more of a meaningful career he could have as an actor.)
The layered, time-shifting storytelling of Adoration, and the way Egoyan shows Simon questing for a sense-making narrative, allows sidelights to be thrown on various important issues, such as the way cultural outsiders may or may not fit into a society, especially in the years following September 11 2001. These are big, important issues, but Egoyan shows them as folded into the daily lives and evolving attitudes of real people.
As all this implies, Adoration is also a relatively talky film, and cinematic tradition often favours action over chatter. There is much to be said for films that adjure the theatrical strain in cinema’s DNA and go for its unparalleled capacity to show people in action. But it’s also good to have films in which people talk, discuss, argue and tell stories, at the same time as they record themselves on the handy new media. We need to be able look at ourselves without becoming hypnotised by the image.