Atom’s Operatic Bomb: Egoyan’s ‘Seven Veils’ a madcap Melodrama from a True Original

Atom Egoyan’s films have always exuded operatic flair. The characters are so tortured by the past they rebel against the present. And the root causes of the torment are so horrifying—family deaths, sexual perversion, etc.—that their lives must hit a trough of despair before inching upward towards a crescendo. Egoyan himself is a seasoned opera director (and classical music aficionado), so it makes sense his cockeyed riff on “8 ½” (1963) would concern a theater woman past the verge of a nervous breakdown. A madcap, capital M melodrama, Egoyan’s “Seven Veils” is a giddy mash-up of meta references (including clips from the Canadian Opera Company’s “Salome,” which Egoyan directed several times) whose closest relative—besides Egoyan’s oeuvre—is daytime television. Ratcheting up tension and histrionics equally, the film builds to a shriek and releases, conjuring a pitch-imperfect aria coming straight from the shattered soul of a modern-day Salome.

Amanda Seyfried plays Jeanine, a regional theater director who’s tasked with remounting her mentor Charles’s successful “Salome” from decades earlier. To say Jeanine accepts the offer is a bit misleading: it was Charles’ dying wish that Jeanine direct the updated version, and so his widow Beatrice (Lanette Ware), the head of the opera company, grits her teeth and obliges. At a press conference, Jeanine speaks warmly about Charles, although she rouses some fear when mentioning that she might make some minor changes. That Charles and Jeanine had an affair might be, in some films, the central conflict, and Beatrice—the brooding woman scorned—vows to punish Jeanine. While jealousy and revenge are major themes in “Seven Veils”—and throughout Egoyan’s work—the Beatrice/Jeanine dynamic serves more as a symbol (the two never speak or meet face to face on screen) for the broader unraveling.

Adults Repeatedly Fail Children

In flashback sequences, Jeanine unwittingly revisits her formative connection to “Salome,” occurring long before she worked on it with Charles. When she was a child, Jeanine’s father would videotape her, tying a blindfold (to heighten her other senses) around her head, putting her at his mercy. He’d instruct her to dance, gyrating to his feverish encouragement, that breathless urgency mimicking Salome’s father Herod during the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” The amateur footage would later serve as background imagery for Charles’ remake, although for Jeanine, the earlier experience was unequivocally harrowing, a tangible representation of her father’s repeated abuse. The foggy lens and off-kilter angles from Cinematographer Paul Sarossy personifies the grief, infecting older Jeanine at her most vulnerable, the memory vaulting her into permanent imbalance.

Adults repeatedly fail children in Egoyan’s world, but “Seven Veils” is more than just a recycling of old material. The most lurid abuse here is implied rather than revealed explicitly—as Sarossy did so chillingly in “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997)—and it’s heartbreaking to watch Jeanine confront her mother Margot (Lynne Griffin) over FaceTime. Not only is the opera’s opening night approaching, but Jeanine’s marriage is failing, and her life is starting to feel closer to Oscar Wilde’s source material than reality. Despite Margot’s dementia (everyone’s got something!), she knew her husband was a monster and still, Jeanine has to be the one to find words for it. Failing to do so, she moves further away from her life and closer to Salome, paying tribute to the Biblical figure with a climactic beheading, resulting from a laughable yet cagey quid pro quo that Jeanine proposes to her husband’s mistress (who also happens to be Margot’s nurse!).

Egoyan’s Opera Tribute

Egoyan practically trips over himself to provide nearly a dozen characters with full backstories and satisfying narrative arcs. Some land flat, or don’t cohere, but Atom’s gonna Atom, and it’s inspiring to witness this humane filmmaker juggling his customarily sprawling ensemble. “Seven Veils” transforms from an opera tribute to an actual soap opera, but Egoyan’s kinetic storytelling conjures the manic youth of a scrappy anti-commercial filmmaker. Egoyan remains a true original, and his “Exotica” (1994) has to rank among the most important independent films of the last thirty years. That he hasn’t made a better film since—and maybe never will—speaks to his insatiable risk appetite, a willingness to craft intimately personal films that gaze outward while reflecting inward. He may repeat themes but each film is singular in its approach to pain and healing, and in “Seven Veils” it’s a joy to spend time in his (unsevered) head.