Exotica · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two officers stand behind one-way glass at Pearson airport customs, watching passengers come off a flight. One of them puts the job plainly: you have to imagine what brought a person to this point. That is the first scene of Exotica, and it turns out to be the instruction manual for everything after it.

You will need it. A tax auditor buys the same table dance from the same dancer every night; she performs in a schoolgirl kilt to Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows." The MC who introduces her from a booth above the floor used to be her boyfriend, and his patter keeps sliding out of seduction into something wounded. The club's owner, pregnant, watches her own floor through another one-way mirror, wearing her dead mother's dresses. A pet-shop owner smuggles rare eggs through the airport we have just seen. Every scene is perfectly clear. None of them explains any other. Egoyan holds that condition for most of the film's 103 minutes.

Deleuze's name for an image in this state is the lectosign: a picture that has stopped being self-evident and has to be read. Normally you don't read shots, you follow them. A man loads a gun, and the next shot is already implied. Here you get a man folding bills into another man's hand so he can sit near a girl in a kilt, and you can decode that instantly. You will decode it wrong. That is Egoyan's specific invention in this film: he builds a machine that offers you the cheapest available interpretation first — pervert, obsessive, creep — and revokes it in the last five minutes, and the thing underneath turns out to be a murdered child and a father with nothing to do about it.

Nothing to do about it is the technical point. Deleuze splits cinema at the moment when seeing stops leading to doing. In the older regime, a character perceives a situation and acts on it, and the cut serves that chain. In the modern one you get pure optical situations — images a character can only look at — and a protagonist who becomes a seer rather than an agent. Francis's daughter Lisa is dead. Christina was her babysitter. There is no act available anywhere in the world that answers that, so he buys a seat and sits still. What makes Exotica extraordinary is that the club has written the sensory-motor break into its business model. The cardinal rule is no touching. It is a contract that manufactures seers. Eric sees the whole room from the booth and touches nothing. Zoe watches through glass. The customs officers watch through glass. Deleuze describes a modern figure where the character goes motionless and movement passes over into the world around them; the table dance is that figure sold by the song.

And Christina in the kilt is a crystal-image — Deleuze's term for a shot where the actual thing and its virtual double exchange places too fast to be told apart, like a mirror where you can't say which side is the reflection. She is a working dancer earning a living and she is the image of a dead schoolgirl, in the same body, in the same gesture, and the film never separates the two. Zoe in her dead mother's dresses in her dead mother's room is the same operation with a different corpse. Around them the room is painted jungle, draped canopy, foliage the lighting never quite lets you confirm as fake, and mirrors you can only see through in one direction. Deleuze would call that a perfect crystal: an enclosed world of doubles with no outside to check it against.

The kilt also carries a debt with a date on it. Hitchcock made Judy put on the grey suit, and Deleuze reads Hitchcock as the filmmaker of the relation-image, where a single object condenses the relation the whole film runs on — a symbol in his narrow sense. Scottie is trying to bring a dead woman back. Francis has no such hope. He rents the costume anyway, nightly, the way you keep a room heated for someone who is not going to arrive.

Against the hothouse, Sarossy gives you the field: overexposed, hazy, flat wide light that leaves the searchers no shadows. This is an any-space-whatever at its emptiest, a space that has stopped serving as a setting for action. And note what actually happened there. Eric, a volunteer, found the body. The field is where looking finally did find something, and it was too late. Every act of looking in the club afterward is a rehearsal of a search that succeeded.

Those field images arrive unannounced, under dialogue, cut on the cadence of a voice — the grammar Resnais invented in Hiroshima mon amour, adopted here almost intact. It matters that they are not flashbacks. A flashback is dated and filed: this happened then. Deleuze calls that a recollection-image, and reserves sheets of past for something else, the past as a terrain you are already standing on and moving through out of order. Shipton's cutting refuses the file. Then the film proves the point structurally: the last scene is chronologically the first, Francis driving the babysitter home, and one line of it rewrites every transaction you have watched. The past was never behind this film. It was underneath it.

And the murder itself is never in the frame. Deleuze distinguishes the out-of-field that is simply next door from the absolute out-of-field, something that cannot be located in the film's space at all and governs everything inside it. That structure is Antonioni's; L'Avventura loses a woman and never finds her, and her absence reorganizes everyone left. Egoyan takes the architecture and then breaks Antonioni's rule — he answers the question. The answer changes nothing, and that is the argument.

The film's deepest image is the emptiest room in Francis's preserved house, where Tracey is paid by the hour to sit while he is out. A babysitter with no child. Deleuze's gest is a posture that exposes the social relation holding it up, and this is one: money paid for the shape of an evening after its content has been removed. Once you have seen it there you see it everywhere — bills into Eric's hand, contraband opened on the customs table, a dance where the goods are attention. Bresson is the ancestor, the flattened voices and the close attention to hands completing an exchange.

Naturalism, in Deleuze, digs under the social surface to find an originary world of raw appetite. Egoyan's originary world was built by two production designers out of painted fronds and fabric. Nothing in Exotica is exotic; the primal is a set, dressed for domestic consumption. The pet shop is the same machine in miniature: aquaria, heat lamps, incubators, engineered climates for imported life. Both rooms exist to keep alive something that does not belong there.

What this did to narrative is now so absorbed it's hard to see as new. Shipton cross-cuts scenes that look simultaneous and are not, and withholds the joining information exactly where a thriller would supply it. Deleuze calls a cut like that an interstice, an irrational join: the sense lives in the gap, in neither tile. Egoyan proved a feature could run ninety minutes on unreadable adjacency and hold an audience emotionally, because the withholding was the grief rather than a device laid over it. The decade after is full of modular puzzle films; critics later named the mode the mind-game film, a label from film studies rather than from Deleuze. Most of those films you rewatch to check the mechanism. This one you rewatch to see how kind these people were being to each other while you were busy suspecting them.

Miramax sold it on a strip club and a schoolgirl uniform, and audiences came for an erotic thriller and got Pinter — whose dramaturgy of menace inside impeccable politeness, staged through reflective surfaces, is right there in Zoe's booth, The Servant turned into architecture. The mismatch is the film's own subject. Watching a stranger and supplying a story is what customs does, what the club sells, and what you did for an hour.

So watch it again and keep one question open: does the ritual work? Nobody is cured. Francis will be back tomorrow, and Christina will put on the kilt. But something is being held together in that room by people who have agreed on the fiction, and the film declines to tell you whether that is a sickness or a kind of care. Watch what the hands are doing. Watch who is being gentle.