Speaking Parts

A Canadian film set in a hotel. Lance works in the laundry. He wants to be an actor and for now he carries towels. His job has another side. Some of the women staying at the hotel call him to their rooms and he goes. Lisa cleans at the same hotel. She is in love with Lance and does not tell him. There is a video booth. Lisa rents tapes from it, and Lance is in every tape she rents; films in which he appears as an extra. She watches the same scenes again and again. From there the film brings in a third person. Clara is a screenwriter; she is staying at the hotel and has written a text about her own brother. Her brother is dead. She had donated an organ to him and now wants the story filmed. Lance wants the part. Clara chooses him and a relationship forms between them. Then the producer intervenes. The text is changed, the brother is removed, and the story becomes something else. What the narrative is interested in is not love but recording: in this film everyone looks at everyone else through a screen; the video booth, the hotel monitors, a satellite link and a tape archive set up in a cemetery. That cemetery is its strangest idea. Recordings of the dead are kept and relatives come to watch. The narrative also stages a funeral as a live broadcast. The form is cold. The camera is still, the colours are pale, and the speech is without feeling. Michael McManus, Arsinée Khanjian, Gabrielle Rose and David Hemblen are in the cast. Atom Egoyan wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Canadian independent cinema of the late 1980s and films built on the image. Who it is not for: anyone looking for warmth; the narrative is deliberately distanced and gets close to none of its characters.