Amanda Seyfried in a scene from Atom Egoyan's opera-inspired Seven Veils, which will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.Amanda Matlovich/The Canadian Press
- Written and directed by Atom Egoyan
- Starring Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard and Michael Kupfer-Radecky
- 107 minutes; classification N/A
Film and opera director Atom Egoyan has called the Dance of the Seven Veils “the most famous striptease in history.” Can the story of Salomé, King Herod and John the Baptist ever be reclaimed from the male gaze?
Egoyan began asking that question as a neophyte opera director in 1996 when the Canadian Opera Company asked the rising film auteur to stage a new production of Richard Strauss’ Salomé. He obliged with a production that used film projections and simultaneous video to explain Salomé's wickedness – spurned by John the Baptist, she demands his head from Herod in exchange for her dance – through a backstory of sexual abuse in a voyeuristic culture.
And now Egoyan returns to it, both in last winter’s third remount of the 1996 Salomé at the COC and with his new film, Seven Veils, debuting at TIFF, in which he uses a fictional female surrogate to push the question into the #MeToo era.
Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is an obscure theatre director asked to remount her late mentor’s production of Salomé at a big-city opera house. She takes on the task with diffidence but clarity: When she was a child her father had obsessively filmed her performance in theatrical trust exercises; years later, when she was the 20-year-old protégé and lover of the unseen opera director Charles, he had used that creepy paternal relationship as the basis for his abused Salomé. So, exploited by two men, both now dead, Jeanine promises “minor changes” to the great director’s Salomé.
This is not an opera movie but rather a fictional feature set during opera rehearsals, cleverly shot on the COC’s stage at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto and in its rehearsal halls. The most remarkable element is surely the way Egoyan has seamlessly integrated footage from previous COC productions, that he shot himself at the time, into his new film to give it the breadth of a genuine stage performance. (In this regard, he owes a lot to his co-producer, Rhombus Media, a Toronto company renowned for translating stage performance to film.)
In the film, several opera singers from the 2023 COC production, including Ambur Braid as Salomé, Michael Schade as Herod and Michael Kupfer-Radecky as John the Baptist, play themselves. Or rather, fictional versions of opera singers who share their names: Kupfer-Radecky has particular fun playing an obnoxious primo uomo and serial sexual harasser. The trio handles these roles comfortably, also adding breadth to the film with the notable naturalism of their performances. Perhaps counterintuitively, theirs are among the least mannered characters.
As is often the case with Egoyan, a stronger director of images than actors, the flattened performance style he favours can make the less experienced seem wooden rather than expressionistic (while his own hard emphasis on symbolism can be overblown, too). As a slightly creepy podcaster interviewing Jeanine, Joey Klein neatly captures the note of awkwardness in their quiet interchange while Douglas Smith, as an understudy who has a crush on her, is left mooning about like some miserable Shakespearean swain.
Returning to his pronounced interest in the relationship between voyeurism and the camera that fuelled his early films (Exotica; The Adjuster), Egoyan introduces a whole variety of media here. He flashes back to the home movies shot by Jeanine’s father; in the present, she does long-distance Zoom calls with her young daughter, philandering husband and an aging mother, who suffers from dementia. Meanwhile, the opera company’s props mistress (Rebecca Liddiard) is doing a video blog for the marketing department.
Liddiard successfully produces the pleasant professional tone of these videos explaining how she is crafting John the Baptist’s head, before this moves into a prolonged subplot about the singers and their understudies. On the other hand, the notion that Jeanine is similarly recording a personal statement for the opera company website – because they have refused to print her director’s note in the program – seems mere pretext for her internal monologue with the late Charles. Similarly, her cool video exchanges with her estranged husband feel forced, as does Egoyan’s emphatic gesture to mark her final break with her late father.
What Seyfried handles magnificently are the scenes where Jeanine directs her cast, with passion and anger, gradually revealing the extent to which this opera production, if not actually revenge, is certainly a reckoning. If the understated character of the early scenes is something of a cypher, now the premise that she is probing her feelings through art feels emotionally real and the film’s conceit comes powerfully to life. Seyfried’s descriptions of obsessive love, from the perspective of lover and of object, are gripping.
Finally Seven Veils emerges as a fascinating film about appropriation – not cultural but personal, the morally dubious territory in which the artist takes your trauma and spins it into gold. And, in this fiction at least, Salomé's story is reclaimed.
Seven Veils will open in theatres at a date to be determined.