Dir. Atom Egoyan, Canada, 2010, 101 mins, English & French with subtitles
Cast: Devon Bostick, Scott Speedman, Arsinée Khanjian
Review by Carol Allen
Canadian/Armenian director Egoyan is never afraid to challenge his audience and the challenge is usually worth the effort. In this case, it certainly is.
This is a film which starts off being about one thing - a schoolboy whose school project takes on a life of its own on the internet - and we then realise that this story is taking us somewhere totally different, revealing an unexpected link between the boy, his family and his father's past in the Middle East.
Simon (Bostick) is an orphan. His parents were killed in a road accident when he was a small boy. His grandfather Morris (Kenneth Welsh) has led Simon to believe the accident was his father's fault. His uncle Tom (Speedman), with whom he lives, keeps his own counsel. The school project is an exercise set by Simon's French teacher Sabine to translate a news story about a terrorist, who plants a bomb in the airline luggage of his pregnant girlfriend. But when Simon re-imagines the story as being that of his parents, with his father cast as the terrorist and his mother the innocent woman, the teacher encourages him to deliver it to the class as though it were the truth. When the tale then gets into the wider world of online chat rooms, it has an unexpected knock on effect which, via Sabine's hidden agenda, ultimately reveals to Simon the truth about his family.
It takes a while initially to work out the relationships, particularly of that between Simon and Morris, whom we meet as an anonymous and vitriolic old man dying in hospital, and for a while one is not sure how much of what we are seeing is reality and what is in Simon's imagination. But with patience it all becomes clear, as it develops into an intriguing journey into a human mystery with several unexpected twists, as skeletons pop out of cupboards, old family conflicts are revealed and finally resolved.
Bostick is very engaging as the boy in his need to find out the truth of his family, Khanjian unsettling in her manipulations as the teacher and Speedman very good as the apparently feckless, well meaning uncle, whose self esteem has been destroyed by Morris. The repercussions of Simon's project, presenting fiction as truth and being believed, make a comment on our media dominated society but the film is primarily an engrossing human story. It's an unusual and original piece of work, somewhat artificial in its conception but always interesting. It's also beautifully filmed with perfectly framed shots that serve and never intrude on the story.
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