London Film Festival: Adoration

Atom Egoyan's latest film is a fractured and timely parable commenting on everything from terrorism, racism and religious intolerance, to education, an unchecked internet, and the exploitation of suffering. A lot to be sure, and maybe too much, because for me, the result is a film that works well as a tightly crafted dissertation, but one without the emotional heart and sense of reality to keep it from feeling like anything but a well constructed technical exercise.

The film begins with Simon, a teenage boy orphaned years before, being asked by his teacher to translate a newspaper article about a terrorist tricking his pregnant wife into boarding an aeroplane with a bomb in her luggage. Simon, with the help of his teacher convinces the rest of his class, and then the wider world that this is in fact remarkably similar to the story of his own parents. From the classroom, the story ripples out across the internet where Simon holds court in webcam chats with strangers, drawn to his story for their own myriad reasons. Gradually the truth of Simon's parents' life and death emerges and questions about which characters are manipulating which comes to the fore.

I personally found aspects of Adoration to be fascinating; From traditional news media using Wikipedia as a research tool, to Lonelygirl on YouTube being unmasked as an actor, there is a genuine concern with the reliability of information on the internet and this film taps right into it. Ideas of internet celebrity and unreliable blogging are tied into wider concerns about terrorism, post-9/11 paranoia and a more general sense of emotional distance - The characters that sit and listen to Simon are everything from racists, looking to go on a diatribe with a modicum of anonymity, to lost souls, desperately using Simon's story to fill an emotional hole in their own lives.

While such themes gave me a lot to think about, my patience with the film dwindled as it went on; As the narrative threads are drawn together a little too neatly to be believable, too often I felt like the characters were more like chess pieces being moved around to serve a function, rather than felling like real people. You could argue that this misses the point, that Adoration is more of an allegory than a traditional narrative, but for me Egoyan's earlier Exotica was a much more successful blending of character driven story and intelletual discussion than this.