As much as critics have lapped up Egoyan’s description of Exotica as an “emotional striptease,” lauding the film for gradually unveiling the layers behind the characters’ actions through its unusual structure, there hasn’t been a sufficient reckoning with the depth of the term. However much a stripper discards their outer garments to reveal their body, it’s difficult to determine the depth of their thoughts or the reasons guiding their actions, not to mention the social, racial, and transactional elements of our sexual fantasies that dictate the nature of their job and draw their customers into their allure. The overt psychological trappings chronicling the devastating tragedy, familial longings, and the bizarre therapeutic means of combating trauma in Exotica cannot be cleanly separated from the conventions and (sexual) repressions of the society the characters spring from, neither can they be linearly linked as simple cause-and-effect like the case in Anora, where the transactional nature of the stripper’s jobs automatically points to the impossibility of Ani thinking of love and sex in any other way. Egoyan, on the other hand, plunges into this welter of contradictions by filming both intimately and from a distance, all while acknowledging the impenetrability of his characters’ rituals even as he occasionally leans too much on the Freudian and Lacanian. Disentangling the complexities of the trauma in favor of the psychological not only fails to reckon with the absurdities of the storytelling and setting, but also leaves Exotica only as a nifty twist film that neatly fills the pieces of its puzzle.
A story with multiple moving parts, Exotica zones in on the life and lives surrounding Francis (Bruce Greenwood), a tax auditor grieving the loss of his child and wife. He frequently visits the chic strip club, Exotica, where he enacts his fantasy of the male protector with Christina (Mia Kirshner), his former babysitter. Still shaken by the brutal murder of his child, Francis needs reassurance from a character in his past life to give him his fulfillment as a father, even if Christina’s job is to dance erotically around him in a schoolgirl costume. However, this isn’t sufficient for him as he employs his brother’s daughter, Tracey (Sarah Polley), to babysit even if there is no one in the house. The strip club has hierarchies and buried histories of its own, with the announcer, Eric (Elias Koteas), being Christina’s ex-boyfriend, and the owner, Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian), in a romantic relationship of sorts with Christina despite signing a contract with Eric to help her procure a child. Professionally, Francis is called to investigate the owner of an exotic pet store, Thomas (Don McKellar), a socially awkward gay man who is illegally importing animal eggs from different countries.
A mere surmise itself points to sleaze, and the marketers naturally pounced on this opportunity to sell this film as an “erotic thriller.” It doesn’t help that the film itself is perched on the border of drama and exploitation, even tipping over to the latter from time to time. The lush kitsch of the strip club has its own dream-like pull, which Egoyan gladly luxuriates in through slow tracking shots around the fake plants bathed in moodily lit purple hues, with spasms of yellow glows penetrating through the spaces between them. Zoe’s womb-like office harkens to an aristocratic bordello through its tortuous passageways, brightly gilded walls, and the hourglass silhouette-shaped one-way mirrors, inviting voyeuristic pleasure in the guise of surveillance (to check if the strip club’s rules of no touching are followed). Mychael Danna’s musical score freely borrows from Hindustani and Indian film music, with the opening theme’s shehnai even dancing around snake-charmer exoticism. Danna, however, pushes his borrowings and fusions in exciting directions through tape loops, backtracks, and electronic beats. And what to make of Christina’s act, which as Eric announces, corresponds to a pedophilic schoolgirl fantasy, which is further complicated by Francis’ relationship with Tracey? Most of all, why was good old-fashioned therapy never an option for Francis?
The eventual story progression does reveal half of these interactions to be more benign than their appearances suggest, but the discomfort lingers. Egoyan might have provided a psychological explanation, but he never makes it all-encompassing. Through his implausible storyline and striptease structure, Egoyan wrenches the ordinary from its preferred setting, retaining the form of everyday rituals while altering the place and context. Francis’ drives with Tracey later reappear as a flashback of his same ritual with Christina, only this time, the more raucous, “exotic”, multiracial neighborhood of Tracey’s is supplanted by chilling suburbia. Even the one-way mirrors, which seem normal for a strip club, first appear in an airport, where a customs official is asked to observe Thomas for any hints of his activities. Grainy videos of Francis’ wife and daughter brushing the camera aside allude to possible frictions, or even abuses, in his relationship with them, only to be later unveiled as a playful moment. Like Ferrara in New Rose Hotel and Godard before that, Egoyan exploits the grain in videos to undermine our ideas of recorded truth and verisimilitude. This constant switching, reconfiguring, and decontextualizing of the “normal” forces us to interrogate the “normal” itself, conflating both voyeuristic pleasures with surveillance, and incest fantasies (a common staple of Egoyan’s films and one which he frequently raises in his interviews) or, more accurately, masculine power fantasies in relationships with women, both younger and older, with paternal care. The later revelations do not subtract from the chilling effects of the earlier scenes, and in fact, as in the case of the film’s final shot of Christina’s house, they even amplify them.
Among all these actions hovers the specter of transaction. Each of these actions, Francis offering money to Christina (both before and now) and Tracey, Thomas to the men he meets at the ballet, Zoe’s contract with Eric, and, of course, Francis’ audits of Thomas’ financial books, ends up both weakening and strengthening their relationships. Egoyan subtly imbricates money in his complex network of relationships, allowing his characters both to distance themselves while simultaneously reifying the darker fantasies in their interactions — and this is especially the case of Francis being both the provider and protector in his family, and by extension, to Christina and Tracey as well. If the personal being wedded to the transactional seems shocking, no medical therapy can proceed without this exchange.
By intermingling the racial, social, and transactional with our sexual fantasies, Egoyan and his collaborators, particularly Danna, offer us a profound meditation on exoticism, even though one gets the sense that he might be biting off a little more than he can chew. Egoyan, unlike so many lesser directors, never congratulates himself on his twist, nor does he subordinate his characters to his explorations. All the film’s characters are sympathetic even if we can sense the sinister lurking beneath the surfaces, and this is a testament to the performances, particularly a remarkably restrained Greenwood, and to Egoyan’s filmmaking, which entrances us into their fantasies and plumbs deep into their sorrows while simultaneously questioning their (and our) rituals and conventions. Francis not being the murderer nor a lech offers us some relief, but it would be a mistake to attribute the horrors to something external. These reconfigured rituals don’t exist just for the sake of a slick twist, but to remind us that what we term as malevolent is, in fact, all too human.
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