TIFF 2023: Trauma, opera and a severed head: How Atom Egoyan revisited the Salome spotlight

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Atom Egoyan was not surprised when the Canadian Opera Company asked for another remount of Salome for the 2022-23 season. With its film and video elements, his dark psychological take on the Richard Strauss opera had a strong record of revivals – since its premiere in 1996, it had been shown two more times at the COC and been picked up by several other companies. This would mark its seventh outing.

But Egoyan wondered whether his macabre look at unrequited love was still up to date.

“It felt that what was provocative and of its moment in 1996 needed to be re-examined,” he said in a recent interview. “But, of course, there isn’t really much time when you do a remount to reconstruct. And so I thought of writing a script where I had a character who was coming back from another time to recalibrate the piece.”

That was the genesis for Egoyan’s new film Seven Veils, which takes place backstage during rehearsals for a production of Salome and made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last week with an opera-house screening at the Four Seasons Centre. It marks the culmination of a most unusual double-headed project in which Egoyan simultaneously remounted the stage production of the opera and shot a fictional film about a stage director doing the same, using the COC’s own stage and rehearsal halls.

“By the time we did the remount, the script was ready … The complexities of a film shoot while you’re also in rehearsal: that was a very tall order,” he said, adding that financing was complicated because it involved working with both the opera’s unions and the film ones. “Somehow when I wrote this thing I thought we could just piggyback on the rehearsal process, but it was a lot more complicated.” He turned to producer Niv Fichman of Rhombus Media, who specializes in putting the stage arts on film, for the practicalities.

And, on the performance side, he cast Amanda Seyfried as Jeanine, a minor theatre director who is remounting her great, late mentor’s production of Salome, surrounded by troublesome singers and skeptical management. Egoyan had previously cast her as an escort in the 2009 infidelity drama Chloe and felt she would project this new character’s isolation in way that would win the audience’s empathy.

Crucially, Jeanine is a female director revisiting the story of Salome. Spurned by John the Baptist, the Biblical character agrees to perform the Dance of Seven Veils for the lascivious King Herod in exchange for the Baptist’s severed head. The script for Strauss’s opera is taken from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, a masterful examination of unrequited love, but the character and her necrophilia remain a ripe occasion for misogyny. Back in 1996, Egoyan’s solution was to add film and dance elements to the opera to conjure up a backstory in which Salome is the object of voyeurism since girlhood and a victim of sexual abuse.

But in 2023, he felt more was required and, in effect, replaced himself with Jeanine to tell the story from a woman’s point of view.

“It’s been a male thread, right from the Bible to this whole series of 19th century figures from [Gustave] Flaubert to Gustave Moreau to [Joris-Karl] Huysmans to Oscar Wilde. And then Richard Strauss writes this extraordinary opera and then I had the privilege of mounting it.”

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But now, Jeanine would step into Egoyan’s shoes to play director. She is also closely associated with Salome: Her character has been doubly abused. As a girl, she was obsessively filmed by her artistic father; as a young adult, she became the protégé and then lover of an opera director who used that inappropriate paternal attention to inspire his groundbreaking Salome. Both men are now dead and, in his will, her mentor has requested she remount Salome. So, she is recreating – and perhaps reclaiming – the story of her own artistic exploitation, fully aware that is what she is doing.

“I was getting tired of films and dramas where there’s that moment where something trickles to someone to recall a trauma. I thought wouldn’t it be interesting to have a character who actually was completely lucid about her trauma … and seemed to be able to move forward and to cope with it,” he said.

In the shoot Seyfried was working with real opera singers – key singers from the COC production in February were cast as versions of themselves with Canadian soprano Ambur Braid playing Salome on stage and a soprano named Ambur on film. Meanwhile the German singer Michael Kupfer-Radecky plays Johann, or John the Baptist, and a fictional version of himself, imagined as an obnoxious opera star eager to grope both Ambur and the propmaker who is creating his severed head. By the time Egoyan was shooting those scenes, the COC production was up and running so the opera singers had free time during the day to shoot an intriguing double assignment.

Another complex element of the film are the multiple layers of narrative styles Egoyan used to mimic the layers of Strauss’s music, in turn inspired by Wilde’s play.

“What is remarkable about Oscar Wilde’s text is that he uses language to describe that which you cannot possess. And if you find a way to describe it, if you find the right words, that gives you some sense of ownership of that object of desire,” he said. “What Richard Strauss then does is he illustrates those words musically. It was a revolutionary piece of music, not because it’s atonal … but just because it uses every chromatic device and sonic elaboration to describe what people are saying.

“It’s not using a traditional motif structure: I just wanted to replicate that visually, to use a whole battery of different types of images, from stage images to domestic images, to archival images on video, to images made by people’s cellphones. I wanted to use the full palette of filmed images to retell the story in our time.”

This includes his own archival footage from the various COC productions blended into the new film. At the Four Seasons Centre premiere audiences experienced an odd doubling effect as they watched both old images of actual productions of Salome and new footage of the very hall in which they sat.

In the film, the auditorium is empty, waiting for a rehearsal to begin; at the premiere, it was filled with people and applause.