'Seven Veils' Review: Amanda Seyfried Stars as an Opera Director in Crisis in Atom Egoyan's Muddled Drama – IndieWire
Close to the climax of Richard Strauss’ opera “Salome,” the title character performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for her stepfather, King Herod. The dance is completed as a barter: In change, Herod will behead the person Salome loves in order that she might kiss his lips. The Dance of the Seven Veils finds Salome swaying and whirling erotically with a set of scarves, touchdown someplace between an object of sexual fascination for her onlookers and a lovestruck girl reaching for company by means of motion.
“Seven Veils,” written and directed by Atom Egoyan (“The Candy Hereafter”), follows an opera director who’s staging a manufacturing of “Salome” and, just like the tragic heroine, clashes with a sequence of males in her quest to recuperate a way of management. This slippage between artwork and life, sincerity and trickery, is essential to deriving some sense of that means from this unusual and sultry however finally exasperating movie, which performs like “TÁR” as refracted by means of “Madeline’s Madeline” with quite a lot of shards of glass lacking.
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Reuniting with Egoyan after the 2010 thriller “Chloe,” Amanda Seyfried stars as Jeanine, a poised stage director who’s getting into her new position after apprenticing on a model of “Salome” years earlier. Again then, she labored below a famed director named Charles, with whom Jeanine was additionally having an affair. We quickly be taught that Charles, who has since died, appropriated traumatic components of Jeanine’s childhood in his rendition of “Salome,” and now, after his passing, Jeanine is set to reclaim the opera by placing her personal spin on its staging.
This already tangled premise is additional sophisticated by a sequence of ancillary backstage dramas. A number of revolve across the willful prop grasp, Clea (Rebecca Liddiard), who’s pushing for her girlfriend (Vinessa Antoine), an understudy within the manufacturing, to imagine the highlight as an alternative of the star (Ambur Braid). Unfolding alongside Jeanine’s private journey, this stilted subplot just isn’t solely pointless, however genuinely distracting. Oftentimes it feels as if the movie at hand had been being interrupted by the ridiculous, campy feed of a special story altogether.
Egoyan, a talented storyteller at residence with cinematic jigsaw puzzles (“Exotica,” for instance), isn’t just throwing concepts on the wall to see what sticks. His decisions are deliberate, and the parallels between Jeanine and Salome emerge with a beautiful sluggish construct that produces extra moody questions than solutions. Each of the ladies had been sexualized and exploited by their fathers, however though the acts had been distressing, they finally enabled the lovestruck heroines to attach with the lads they coveted.
Egoyan can also be keen on exploring how modern sexual politics can collide with artistic imaginative and prescient. At one level, Jeanine tries to recreate a suggestive scene onstage as Charles as soon as directed it. A lot to Jeanine’s chagrin, an opera home worker insists on summoning the manufacturing’s intimacy coordinator to supervise the blocking. There’s one thing doubtful concerning the second, as if Egoyan — who directed a manufacturing of “Salome” in 1996 — had been figuring out his personal confusion and frustration with onset security by means of Jeanine. However the scene nonetheless rings far more true than the movie’s dealings with intercourse and energy elsewhere, particularly a severely misguided plot twist involving a sexual assault on a theater worker.
The movie strikes on loads of lovely photographs, notably through the Dance of the Seven Veils, which Jeanine phases behind a curtain in rippling silhouette. (The cinematographer is Paul Sarossy.) There are additionally painfully apparent visible motifs, together with a portrait of Jeanine’s household that she insists on defacing. It’s an affordable trope, and the act of sabotage finally ends up being much less to the portray than to any semblance of cinematic gravitas.
Performing because the movie’s teetering anchor, Seyfried channels an enchanting mix of composure and chaos that, in a much less muddled film, would have sung. But right here, her portrayal of an assured girl unraveling below strain merely lends a haunting observe to a story that strikes as concurrently laborious and opaque.
Grade: C+
“Seven Veils” premiered on the 2023 Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition. It’s at the moment searching for U.S. distribution.
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