Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Sweet Hereafter
1997 · Atom Egoyan · The Sweet Hereafter on Sightlines
A teenage girl reads aloud by lamplight. Two small children listen, half asleep, while she gives voice to the Pied Piper: the piper, the rats, the town of Hamelin that will not pay what it owes. It is a warm room in a cold country. Nicole Burnell is babysitting the Ansell children, and Atom Egoyan holds the scene almost still, like a picture. We already know a school bus will go off an icy road in this town and that fourteen children will die, because the film has told us. So we watch the lamplit room knowing something it cannot know. That double knowledge is the film.
The Sweet Hereafter (1997) moves among at least three times. The first is Sam Dent, a small town in the British Columbia mountains, before the accident. The second is the winter after, when Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), a lawyer from the city, goes door to door putting together a class-action suit. The third is a frame set about two years later, on an airplane, where Mitchell talks with Allison, an old friend of his estranged daughter. Susan Shipton's editing moves among these times without captions or dissolves. A face, a sound or a line of dialogue is enough to carry us across. Browning's poem drifts over the cuts as if it belonged to every time at once.
A more conventional film would arrange all this as flashbacks. Gilles Deleuze helps us see why Egoyan's arrangement is something else. A flashback, in Deleuze's account, is a recollection-image: an earlier moment, clearly dated, called up to explain the one we're in. It answers a question. Here nothing is called up to explain anything. The before and the after sit side by side, like rooms off the same hallway, and we walk among them. Deleuze called this the coexistence of sheets of past. The past isn't a file stored somewhere behind us. It is a region we move through in no fixed order, and each sheet holds a whole life at a different depth. The lamplit room, the kitchen table where papers get signed and the airplane seat aren't steps in a sequence. They are layers of one grief, and each cut lets us pass from one layer to another.
Why does this lens help? It explains the film's strange calm. Grief doesn't happen in order. A parent in Sam Dent lives the school morning and the empty bedroom in the same breath. The structure isn't a puzzle laid over the town. It's how the town feels time. The film holds back the accident itself for much of its running time, and dread gathers around an event we know has already happened. Cause and consequence arrive together.
Now set that against Mitchell. He is the one person in the film who believes in the old kind of story: somebody is responsible, so find them, sue them, and turn loss into compensation. That is what Deleuze called the action-image, the logic of classical cinema, in which a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. The lawsuit is an action-image walking into a time-image. Mitchell sits at kitchen tables with his legal pad. The families sign, and the town comes further apart, because each grief turns out to be privately at odds with the others. Holm plays him as controlled, practiced and persuasive. But his phone calls with his daughter, who is lost to addiction, show a father who can do nothing for his own child. The film suggests his crusade is partly a grief moved onto other people's children. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer answer what they see with an act that fits it.
The landscape knows this before anyone does. Paul Sarossy shoots the valley in anamorphic widescreen, with snow, rock and low winter light, and human figures small in all that white. Aerial and high-angle views of the frozen lake keep returning. Deleuze's term for places like this is the any-space-whatever, a space that no longer serves as a setting for action. These white stretches aren't where things get done. They are where the town stands and looks. The camera watches too, rather than chasing. It glides slowly or holds still.
At the center is Nicole. Sarah Polley plays her as watchful and wounded, the still point the film's times turn around. In Browning's poem, one lame child is left behind when the others follow the piper, and Nicole, a survivor in a wheelchair, lives inside that image. Deleuze's name for a figure like her is the seer: someone who can't act on what she perceives but who sees more because of that. Egoyan lets much of her story rest on how people are placed and how they look at each other, rather than on what anyone says. Her singing, a thread tied to Jane Siberry's "One More Colour," carries across the times the way the poem does. It's a voice that doesn't belong to one body at one moment.
This is where Egoyan's invention lies. Russell Banks's novel rotates among first-person narrators, and Egoyan could have kept the voice-overs. Instead he turned the novel's many voices into braided time and gave the poem the job of a second score. The film's chorus is made of tenses.
He didn't find the method alone. Rashomon (1950) gave cinema the single event told by witnesses who can't be reconciled. Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959), a film Deleuze drew on when he wrote about sheets of past, let memory become the logic of the editing. Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) splintered its chronology around a drowned child so that grief bled into premonition. Egoyan's own Exotica (1994), made with the same team (Sarossy, Shipton, composer Mychael Danna and actor Arsinée Khanjian), built a structure that circles a dead child and holds back its grief. The Adjuster (1991) had already set the cool, observing distance. Kieślowski's Three Colors: Blue (1993) is more sibling than ancestor. It shares the elliptical, music-cued editing of a parent's grief.
What The Sweet Hereafter did with this inheritance was pull it toward the classical. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and earned Oscar nominations for direction and adapted screenplay, which is rare for a Canadian art film so far from commercial storytelling. It showed that braided time doesn't have to be a puzzle box. It can be the plain truth of how a community remembers. And it turned down the courtroom drama's promise that finding someone to blame settles anything.
So watch the lamplit room, for the first time or again, and listen for which voice is speaking over which time. Ask what the poem knows that the lawyer doesn't. Then watch for who is still enough to see.
Concepts in play
- sheets of past (coexistence of the past) — Three time frames (the town before the accident, the winter aftermath, the airplane frame two years later) cut together with no captions or dissolves, linked by a face, a sound or a line of dialogue; the Browning poem carries across the cuts
- crisis of the action-image — Mitchell's class-action suit is a classic act of blame and repair, yet it pushes the town further apart; his phone calls to his addicted daughter show a man who can't act on his own loss
- the seer (voyant) — Nicole, the watchful and wounded survivor in a wheelchair, is the still center of the film, like the lame child in the Pied Piper who is left behind
- any-space-whatever (emptiness) — Sarossy's anamorphic white valley and frozen lake, with recurring aerial and high-angle views that dwarf the human figures, where the town looks rather than acts
- recollection-image (named as a contrast) — Used to show what the film avoids: no time frame is presented as a dated flashback that explains the present
- action-image (named as a contrast) — The lawsuit's logic (find who is responsible, act, repair) set against the film's braided, unresolvable time