Contrivance is a careful problem to navigate in fiction. Everything in the page or on the stage has been placed there. The way characters are born and die, how they move between moments, flow in and out of each other’s lives, it’s all chosen by the creator. Part of writing fiction is maintaining a suspension of disbelief not just in the world of the story, but in the way things happen. Conventionally, at least, that’s important. But there’s a magnetic opposite that’s perhaps more compelling, yet harder to balance—storytelling that’s obviously contrived, where the author's hand is so obviously guiding everything, but the why isn’t clear.
Atom Egoyan’s 1994 film Exotica is a closely-threaded quilt, every stitch intentionally wrapping around another, although this only becomes apparent as the film progresses. At first, it’s just disparate bodies brushing past each other, with the camera gliding from one’s exit to another’s entrance. A customs officer looks through a two-way mirror at someone uncomfortably getting his bags searched, the man grabs a cab, the person he splits it with gives him ballet tickets in lieu of payment, the car drives away and a woman walks into a club. There’s a sense of destiny building, but towards what? The woman from outside walks onto the stage, now dressed as a schoolgirl. Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” starts playing and she begins a striptease. The camera pushes in on a single patron, a haggard man in a suit and tie. All the gravity pulls towards him.
The man’s Francis (Bruce Greenwood), who we’ll soon learn is a tax auditor assigned to go over the books of a pet shop run by the man seen earlier at customs, Thomas (Don McKellar), who's been smuggling illegal macaw eggs into the country. What draws Francis to the club, Exotica, night after night is Christina (Mia Kirshner), the schoolgirl dancer, although the seriousness of his obsession implies some unspoken weight behind their for-hire rendezvous. It’s enough to draw the jealous ire of the club’s sleazy DJ, Eric (Elias Koteas), to the point where the club owner, Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian), thinks that his past relationship with Christina is interfering with his ability to do his job. She offers to make the introductions for Christina instead, to which he defends himself by saying he finds doing her intros “therapeutic.” “That’s not what you’re getting paid for,” she retorts.
“Exotica is here for your amusement. We’re here to entertain, not to heal.” Zoe later tells Francis in a kind of mirrored confrontation. Despite her efforts to create an environment purely for voyeuristic enjoyment, the Exotica is a place people are drawn to specifically to mend wounds, the ones cut so deep they’re bottomless. Inside Exotica’s walls are people whose lives have been so upended that they no longer seem real—the space of the Exotica seems less like it's inspired by some real nightclub and more like the imaginings of someone who's never been to one. It’s a film set after the world has ended for its central figure, where normalcy exists only in memory and everyone now lives in some strange, tortured psychosis that can’t be spoken out loud.
The characters in Exotica bounce between feeling like stilted anima to genuine people at the rawest moments of their lives. In some cases, like with McKellar’s performance, this built into Thomas’ reclusive and awkward character. But with Koteas, there’s something more emotionally deep-seated in how he yo-yo’s between uncomfortably disaffected, completely sleazy, and in flashbacks, sadly sincere—there’s been a break in his life that makes it so he can no longer be just who he is, but exist as a series of performances.
This existence is most prominently embodied through Christina, who performs every night on stage in the club, but also exists to the two principal men of the film as a set of roles—one she won’t perform anymore for Eric (lover), and another she tries to replicate for Francis. When she talks about Francis, it’s always in the service that they provide for each other, one that’s tied to their history that nobody else knows, and goes back before his life's rupture. In the absence of natural connections, or perhaps being trapped in a life that can no longer be lived intuitively, this is all that people can give each other, services rendered in mutual exchange. In this way, showing the director’s hand of contrivance isn’t a detriment to the “art” of its storytelling, but instead what makes Egoyan’s knife twisting so gutting.