Felicia's Journey (Terrestrial: July 2003)

Blue Velvet transplanted in the industrial heartland of England by way of a Canadian born Armenian. Director Egoyan's choice of Birmingham as the film's setting is nothing short of genius. The juxtaposition of warm, self-deprecating Brummy mentality & rolling Irish vertiginy bound together by vintage Heartbeat-style score present a comforting innocence in which Egoyan roots his disturbingly twisted tale of migration & the macabre.

From its ardourous beginnings, the film mutates into a shocking indictment of modern culture to equal anything Lynch's has created. Egoyan rewrites Eraserhead & Blue Velvet's most extravagant moments & diffuses their brutality into soft drama, accentuating the terror tenfold through their placation. This is a local film for local people.

It's trademark Egoyan: the smooth sleight of hand as he shifts between plot strands, effortlessly drifting through time & space; the strong, dependable central performances represented by Bob Hoskins' bumbling Brummie, meandering between sweet old philanthropist and brooding psychopath; the usual themes of melancholy, loss & youth. This is art cinema at its most brilliant, more a celebration than a stimulation of the cortex, a piece of art that both entertains & confounds. Hoskins has never been better, creating a character that at one moment one wishes to hug and the next you are hiding behind the sofa from. To call it understated is to understate it's brilliance. The subtlety with which Hoskins expresses such grand complexity & emotion is incredible (Tony Hopkins take note: no fava beans, no classical music, no poetry recitals).

And lying at the heart of it all is a simple message: This is the kind of movie we Brits should be making. Almost every other country in Europe has their own art cinema. We have Ken Loach & Mike Leigh (which says alot about our national state of mind). Everyone complains about the lack of a visible homegrown industry but what do we do when we get a bit of dosh? Make bad HW-wannabe, brit-gangsta movies or Hugh Grant rom-coms. Cinema that has said & done little beyond launching Eddie Izzard the actor. It takes a Canadian to show us what is possible. What we SHOULD be doing. Egoyan has crafted a beautifully strange piece of art that straddles both tradition and modernity. Incidently, a soup in which we find ourselves drowning in at present. He paints a vivid picture of the decay and loneliness of urban living, capturing the Brummie mentality perfectly along the way. Dare I say, Egoyan does everything right. Hell, he even manages to give a nod to Brum's premier art cinema, the Electric.

Your homework this week is to go out and make something as good.

RATING:

(c)Limer 2003