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Pursuing the obsession with sex, death and videotape evident in Family Viewing, Egoyan here addresses the dangers of 'living in a situation in which everything depends upon one's attachment to, or rejection of, certain images'. For Clara (Rose), the danger lies in her desire to turn her dead brother's life into a TV movie, a project from which she is progressively erased. For shy hotel chambermaid Lisa (Khanjian), who watches videos of the man she loves as an extra in movies, it's her naive ignorance of the medium's potential for manipulation. Handsome gigolo Lance (McManus) has a role in both their lives; as the object of Lisa's unrequited, strangely ritualised love; as Clara's lover and the actor playing her brother in the film. In striking contrast to the flat, degraded video images of Family Viewing, the visuals here are lush and beautifully designed; still, a sensation of unreality persists. Machines like the video telephone link used by Lance and Clara as a sex aid seem to hinder rather than aid communication. Nevertheless, far from condemning recording media out of hand, Egoyan scrutinises our ambiguous relationship with them; and as the characters grope towards less alienated (self) images, the film achieves a remarkable synthesis of intellectual analysis and deeply felt emotion.

That the video age has mesmerized us into a collective state of emotional frigidity, spiritual emptiness and self-absorption couldn't be better illustrated than by Atom Egoyan's "Speaking Parts," a Canadian movie in which people find their deepest emotions buried, not in their hearts, but in their TV monitors.

I can't say watching this movie is an uplifting experience -- the effect left after watching "Parts" is a chilling, depressing one. But the bummer is, I presume, what Egoyan intended, and despite its disturbing implications, the movie has an emotional heart of its own, deep within those omnipresent video waves and that trance-inducing synthentic score, that asks us all to drop our channel-flippers and check our pulses.

The plot in "Parts" is appropriately banal, a rather ordinary melodrama of human whims and desires, in which movie extra, aspiring gigolo and hotel sheet-changer Lance (Michael McManus) finds himself the obsessional object of two women: Clara (Gabrielle Rose), a scriptwriter he has hustled for a part in an upcoming movie, and Lisa (Arsine Khanjian), a hotel maid who hangs on the all-but-tranced cover boy's every word and deed.

Gary Tooze

July 4th, 2013