Amanda Seyfried appears in a scene from Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils.Elevation Pictures
Seven Veils
Written and directed by Atom Egoyan
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Ambur Braid and Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Classification N/A; 107 minutes
Opens in select theatres March 7
Critic’s Pick
Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils is packed with lopsided relationships, some of them merely unhappy, many of them downright abusive. A viewer could get dizzy trying to connect all the dots linking the various lovers to the objects of their unrequited obsessions.
The film is set backstage during a production of Salome, the Richard Strauss opera based on the Oscar Wilde play. Egoyan cleverly repurposes footage of his own stage productions of this piece at the Canadian Opera Company in 1996 and 2023, and fits it seamlessly into a fictional story about Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried), a director assigned with restaging the opera. She has been hired according to the last wishes of the late Charles, her former mentor – and much older lover – whose provocative interpretation was based on Jeanine’s own private history.
Egoyan’s original production was famous for its reconsideration of the troubling story of how Salome dances for her stepfather King Herod in exchange for the head of John the Baptist. Using shadow play, the director suggested that Salome was a victim of sexual abuse, thus explaining her unhinged passion for John the Baptist and desire for a grotesque revenge when he spurns her.
A night at the opera, and in the slush, with Seven Veils’ Amanda Seyfried and Atom Egoyan
This is also the interpretation Jeanine is overseeing, with the added fictional twist that the abuse is based on her childhood story: Her father had an unhealthy interest in his young daughter, filming her blindfolded in weird theatrical trust exercises. So Jeanine has twice been exploited by older men in positions of trust. Why Charles’s widow (Lanette Ware), who is also the opera company’s manager, thinks it’s a good idea to honour his dying wish that his former lover remount his production is one of the film’s unsolved mysteries.
Add to this a baritone – opera singer Michael Kupfer-Radecky, delighting in playing an utterly obnoxious primo uomo – who has sexually harassed his Salome (Canadian soprano Ambur Braid) in a previous production and now assaults the props mistress (Rebecca Liddiard), and whose lovesick understudy has long pined for Jeanine, and the backstage complications mount. Meanwhile, in Jeanine’s private life, her mother, who witnessed her late husband’s obsession with their daughter, now suffers from dementia. In the director’s absence, Jeanine’s husband is sleeping with her mother’s paid caregiver.
The film first appeared at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 and 18 months later is finally getting a commercial release. With a second viewing, the tangle of relationships with which Egoyan explores voyeurism, sexual exploitation and artistic appropriation becomes clearer – and all the more impressive. He has taken what he has called “the most famous striptease in history” and found compelling contemporary parallels in the story of how the unseen Charles used Jeanine’s story for personal gain.
The difficulty here is that Egoyan is also doing some appropriation of his own, creating a female protagonist to explore the role of the opera’s director and the impact of her mentor’s theft. There’s no shame there – male artists can imagine female characters and vice versa – but it does create a gap between Egoyan’s vision for the film and Seyfried’s performance. In particular, her personal scenes with her family, mainly shown as video calls, feel highly artificial, emotionally abstract rather than expressive.
Where she shines is in the moments when Jeanine explains to her cast, with increasing passion, what she requires of them. Their incomprehension is almost comic. There is one scene where she has to tell a singer who is performing fellatio on an uncaring man, who has eyes only for Salome, to move her head more. Tellingly, Jeanine is the person in the rehearsal room who best understands sexual obsession.
When this film appeared in 2023, there were obvious parallels with the #MeToo movement that had exposed so much sexual exploitation in the entertainment industries. A year and a half later, it’s the personal side of the story that now echoes the news, since it shares the element of the complicit mother with recent revelations about author Alice Munro. For all its rarefied setting and tangled fictions, Seven Veils feels vividly contemporary.