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Felicia's Journey considered in the running for top international prize.
Liam Lacey- AT CANNES
A FEW tears, a scattering of cheers, and finally, a prolonged standing ovation greeted the debut of Canadian director Atom Egoyan's new film, Felicia's Journey, at the Cannes Film Festival last night. The movie is considered a strong contender for the festival's top prize, the Palme d'or, or Golden Palm- considered the highest honour in international filmmaking.
The 38-year-old Toronto filmmaker, with his trademark round, dark glasses and forelock of hair, raised his arms to the tuxedoed and gowned audience in the 2,000-seat Grande Lumiere theatre. The he embraced the members of his entourage, including his wife, actress Arsinee Khanjian and Hollywood star Mel Gibson, one of the producers of the film. The steady drum of applause continued until Mr. Egoyan and company filed out of the theatre to stand outside on the red-carpeted steps for the photographers-and about 1,000 stargazers- before being whisked away in cars to a celebratory beach party. The vigourous, but almost solemn, response was in marked contrast to the joyous reception for Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's gala on Saturday night for his funny and sentimental All About My Mother, probably the strongest competition entry at that point. Mr. Egoyan's film is, by no stretch of the imagination, a feel-good film.
Felicia's Journey is the portrait of a mentally disturbed, middle-aged Englishman's predatorial attempt to ingratiate himself with a pregnant, homeless 17-year-old Irish girl, Felicia (played by Irish actress Elaine Cassidy). The movie is often creep and sometimes harrowing, but, like Mr. Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, it resolves on a note of hope and redemption. As played by English actor Bob Hoskins, the Englishman-Mr. Hilditch- is an obese, comivally fussy, mother-fixated bachelor who secretly videotapes young women from his car. The audience gradually realizes, with an increasing sense of foreboding, that he is far more dangerous than he intitially seems.
Mr. Egoyan, best known for The Sweet Hereafter, which earned him two Oscar nominations last year and won the runner-up Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 1997, is a festival favourite. This is his third time in the official competition. His first entry was Exotica, in 1994. All three films have focused on teenaged girls in duress. Other themes include how communications technology- phones, cameras and television- paradoxically leads to a greater sense of isolation in the modern world. The chief mark of Mr. Egoyan's reputation as a filmmaker is his often startling, non-linear approach to film narrative. In Felicia's Journey, for example, the opening moments move between a man watching a cooking show on TV, Felicia being stopped at British customs, and back to her travelling on a ferry across the Irish Sea.
The film continues to filp back through time, gradually filing in the pasts of both characters, leading to the culmination of their relationship. Mr. Egoyan has said he believes his filmmaking more accurately reflects the movement of the mind back and forth in time, and that the fragmentary approach, though it risks losing audiences, also allows the audience to participate more intimately with the story. Felicia's Journey is Mr. Egoyan's biggest budgeted film to date, at about $10-million, and is a British-Canadian co-production between Mel Gibson's London-based Icon Entertainment and Toronto's Alliance Atlantis Communications. Shot in Cork, Ireland, and around Birmingham, England, and cast both Ireland and England, it is based on an award-winning novel by Irish writer William Trevor, considered one of the best short-story writers today.
In an interview last week, Mr. Egoyan said he was originally sent the novel by Icon Entertainment, and first considered adapting it to a Canadian context by making Felicia a French-Canadian girl who ends up in Victoria, "which is the city where I was raised, which I always thought was more English than the English." He arranged to meet the 71-year-old writer to explore the idea, but Mr. Trevor was insistent that the novel's allegorial meaning, reflecting the violent history of Irish-English politics, would be lost by translating it to a Canadian context.
Mr. Egoyan, who also wrote the screenplay, changed the novel's ending, "but I believe it's in a way that's truer to the spirit of the novel" than a straight adaptation would have been.
© Globe and Mail
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