MOVIE REVIEW : A World of Mixed-Up Media in Egoyan’s ‘Speaking Parts’

In Atom Egoyan’s “Speaking Parts” (at the Monica 4-Plex), people don’t touch; they watch each other on video.

The ideas suggest Steve Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” but here, Egoyan carries them further. Lost in a strange metallic world of hotel corridors, universal TV hookups and conference rooms, video stores and empty boudoirs, his characters struggle soporifically in a voyeuristic web. Orgies are filmed; even a local cemetery has a mausoleum stocked with video screens and tapes of the dead.

It’s a viscid, gelatinously shiny realm in which all movement is gluey and detached, in which the only on-screen sex occurs through a video-phone hookup. Every scene is darkened, as if to accommodate a TV set. Characters watch each other and themselves on VCRs and, when they dream, they start hallucinating about video images that are watching them back.

For Soderbergh, videotape could filter out lies; for Egoyan, it breeds them. The movie’s paragon of evil is a producer-director (David Hemblen) who destroys the genuine emotion in the script he’s bought by insisting on a spurious TV talk show scene. He’s a malign talking head on huge screen hookups, dictating and destroying by remote control. Through this electronic maze, no one feels or really touches until the very last second--and that moment is played more like a melancholy coda to a portrait of a world gone askew.

Faking it is part of the film’s subject, also the trap into which it occasionally falls. In interviews, Egoyan--like Soderbergh, a great favorite of Wim Wenders--has criticized the “misuse” of film or video as “instruments to enshrine sentiment,” and said: “Nothing is more artificial than traditional realism.” Yet enshrining sentiment--sentimentality, actually--is exactly what he’s used his instruments for here. And his spare, flashily cryptic dialogue is closer to the artificiality of bad movie naturalism than to the high allusive literacy he probably wants.

Egoyan’s style is too cool and detached to appear overtly sentimental, but his material is impregnated with a kind of syrupy self-pity: pared-down soap opera. A very bad commercial TV-movie could have emerged from “Speaking Parts’ ” plot line. The discarded writer is a woman, Clara--played with fine, naked-nerve emotionalism by Gabrielle Rose--whose brother died after saving her life with a lung transplant. Clara replaces him with a young actor, Lance (Michael McManus), whom she hires to play the brother in her teleplay; Lance is a hotel employee adored from afar by a young chambermaid (Egoyan’s girlfriend, Arsine Khanjian), who collects all his non-speaking parts on videotape.

The women feel and respond; the men are cold voyeurs. And all of them--these beautiful youngsters wandering disconsolately through corridors of dread in the post-video emotional holocaust--are ruled by a Big Video Daddy and Mama: the producer and the hotel head housekeeper. This whole idea is deeply sentimental. And since Egoyan seems prey to the same vices he attacks--or, more accurately, nibbles at--one wonders if the manipulative, detached video store owner (played by Tony Nardi, who suggests a younger Peter Coyote) is an ironic self-portrait. In the end, “Parts” seems a narcissistic movie. It may be only partial self-kidding that Egoyan’s company is called Ego Film Arts Inc.

Still and all, “Speaking Parts” (Times-rated Mature for partial nudity, video sex and language) is subtle, thoughtful stuff for serious filmgoers. It’s full of ideas, disturbing metaphors for today’s society, and it’s subtly made by a promising filmmaker with an intelligent vision. It’s also a drowsy, despairing film, in which we and the characters seem to be viewing everything through the other side of an aquarium wall. Egoyan builds up to a paroxysm in which every kind of film or video stock is intercut wildly together: an orgasm of mixed media. But, though Egoyan’s characters may never crystallize into flesh and blood, that’s part of his point. Video sex is the crucial coupling in his vague, nightmare world, the deadly climax of the Video Age.