Atom Egoyan

There are perhaps few directors whose origins influence their cinema as much as in the case of Atom Egoyan. He lives in Canada, but was born in Cairo to an Armenian family. That ethnic and multicultural background is behind or at the bottom of all his stories. Family ties and the inability of the human being to completely abandon solitude are two of his permanent themes, as are the difficulties of integration, the impossibility of discovering why injustice occurs and why innocence is often trampled. Perhaps in his personal life that has a word: uprooting. Something that in his cinema does not seem to be just an external situation, but an internal state of his characters.

Atom Yeghoyan (his real name) was born in Cairo on July 19, 1960. His parents were Armenian refugees and very soon the family moved to Canada, where the future director grew up. Atom comes from a family of artists, since his parents were painters. From a very young age he wanted to dedicate himself to writing, and specifically wanted to be a playwright. He studied International Relations at the University of Toronto and it wasn’t until he was shooting a first short film that he decided that he wanted to tell those same stories but in images. After a few short films, which showed his precocious look with despair and morbidity at his life, Egoyan directed his first feature film at the age of 24, the dramatic comedy Next of Kin, where he talks about the change of identity through lies and in relation to images. In that first film, where he already includes a family of Armenian origin, he worked for the first time with the Lebanese actress Arsinée Khanjian . Egoyan married her and since then, all of her films would have the presence of the actress, until reachingChloe in 2009, where, by the way, she is missed.

After some works for television, shorts or series episodes, he came to the fore in 1988 with another feature film written and directed by him: Family Viewing . This is another drama about family identity. The following year he directs and writes Speaking Parts , again a drama, where the filmmaker already begins to show his sadness and with that morbidity that appears in many of his films: the story is told by a young man with a double life, who works in a hotel and at the same time he is a gigolo. The film was nominated for several awards and won Best Screenplay at the Vancouver Festival. However, it was not released in theaters in the most important countries (including Canada, the United States, France or Spain) due to distribution problems. The next film of him,The liquidator (1991), once again explores dark facets of the human condition, taking feelings to the extreme. Starring Elias Koteas (another of his fetish actors) and Arsinée Khanjian, it is a disconcerting story, where voyeurism and pornography have a place, with misplaced and strange characters. Something similar characterizes his filmExótica (1994), about a man who has lost his family and goes every night to see a dancer in a nightclub. Here sex becomes an obsession, an escape mechanism for empty and sad lives that find no comfort. Previously, Egoyan himself had starred with his wife in the dramatic comedy Calendar (1993), about a photographer who takes snapshots of Armenian churches for a calendar.

Then the best films of the author of Armenian origin would arrive. In 1997 he deliveredThe sweet future , sad and tragic film about pain and guilt, centered on the accidental death of a group of children who were traveling by bus. The nonsense of pain and death stand as the protagonists of this profound drama, starring Ian Holm and Sarah Polley , which won thirty international awards (among them, the Special Jury Prize at Cannes) and was nominated for 2 Oscars, those corresponding to director and script. Very well received by critics, although not so much by the public, it was alsoFelicia’s Journey (1999), thriller-tinged drama starring Bob Hoskins . The English actor plays a bachelor who offers to help a young pregnant woman who is in trouble. But the man appears to be a psychopath responsible for the disappearance of other young women. Although it is an exemplary film due to the psychological introspection of the characters, it is also true that it can be boring and is not suitable for viewers looking for action.

In 2002 Atom Egoyan travels to the bottom of his origins in the formidableArarat , perhaps his best film to date, where he explores the painful historical reality of the Armenian genocide by the Turks. Egoyan denounces the international silence in the face of the tragedy, and at the same time tells a modern story about the difficulties of integration of the Armenians in the West, as well as their desire for revenge and frustration. The film, starring well-known actors and actresses, once again won the recognition of critics, who awarded it with numerous awards.

Three years later, he shot with the even better-known faces of Kevin Bacon , Colin Firth or Alison Lohman , the dark and morbid drama Where the Truth Lies , about the events that involve the confrontation of two Hollywood actors, who had been inseparable friends on a spree. The film can be framed in the thriller and film noir genre, but it failed to achieve the success of its previous films. Something similar happened with her next film, Adoration (2008), focused on shady love affairs set in a high school. That in her last films, Egoyan was losing some of her narrative depth and her personal appeal was finally confirmed with the thriller Chloe(2009), where he once again wallows in shady issues around sex, but where the story, whose script is not by Egoyan, sounds like sheer gruesomeness with no anthropological depth. And it’s a shame because it featured such formidable performers as Julianne Moore , Liam Neeson or Amanda Seyfried .

His next project is shooting the crime thriller Devil’s Knot , with Reese Witherspoon . We will have to see the result of this film, but everything indicates that the erratic path will continue to be the same, unfortunately. And it is that the script, based on a novel, is alien again.