In the upscale Toronto strip club Exotica, dancer Christina is visited nightly by the obsessive Francis, a depressed tax auditor. Her ex-boyfriend, the club's MC, Eric, still jealously pines for her even as he introduces her onstage, but Eric is having his own relationship problems with the club's female owner. Thomas, a mysterious pet-shop owner, is about to become unexpectedly involved in their lives.
Exótica, 色情酒店, Экзотика, Klub Exotica, 엑조티카, Екзотика, エキゾチカ
France
Cannes Film Festival
France12
Germany
USAR
Czechia15+
PortugalM/16
South Korea18
Czechia
France
Germany
Portugal
South Korea
USA
somebody on here dinged this as a "tv detective" story instead of i guess pure uncut glorious art-house cinema or whatever but i think the stuff that keeps it from being totally pretentious or oblique is what i love about it. thoughtful, delicate, kinda like a canadian almodovar, with as much to say about the transactional nature of relationships as fassbinder or eyes wide shut but with empathy & curiosity instead of nihilist resignation or camp horror. in a dumber movie bruce greenwood's character would become a bronson type vigilante instead of turning inward - its an emotional terrain i cant remember seeing a movie confront before. i know a couple other egoyans but tell me where to find more stuff like this!!
indescribable, a tale constructed solely by emotions and empathy, everyone is connected by tragedy, by the terrors of the past and the despairs of the present. exotica is a place of entertainment, not healing according to the owner but this is the only place everyone here has, to escape, to find connection, to try and achieve a form of therapy. and by the end, i was left in a state of profound sadness with tears in my eyes and all down my face. a film of such power that all i could do when the credits rolled was take the disc out, put the dvd back on my shelf, put my headphones on and sob for 10 minutes straight. and as i write this little thing now, i picture the images in my mind and see the pain conveyed and all i can do is try not to let my tears hit the keyboard. utter perfection.
Movies about the transactional nature of sex are a dime a dozen, but I've never seen one home in on the way that it is used not for capitalist subsistence but emotional survival. Though it unfurls as something of a puzzle that slowly connects each character (and this is about as great a "network narrative" as you're likely to see), it really takes its power from how deftly it shows the bitter irony that only human social life in which everyone is more intimately connected than they could possibly fathom could produce such loneliness. There are so many ways this movie could have taken a direction that would result in something still good but more recognizable and digestible, but instead…
This is everything I wanted Crash (1996) to be. Egoyan attempts Cronenberg and excels with his unique psychological stamp. It is not the director's masterpiece, but the specially crafted environment engulfing the darkest and equally complex spheres of human impulses is intoxicating, especially the dissonance achieved between the darkness of it all and the insightful poetry of the soul. Sublimely filmed with a masterful cinematography and very few cuts, Exotica takes a deep dive into the irrational side of human beings while following the director's patterns: vicious cycles, intended repetition, and juxtapositions between past and present, the former to shine a brighter light to the latter. Obsession, dependency and the psychological trauma of disguising the past with the present as if it still was is ultimately haunting. Magnificent finale.
96/100
Was charged recently with putting a list together of the all-time great Canadian films and I put this on it completely based on memory. A revisit has been gnawing at me ever since so I thought it was finally time to make use of that new Criterion Blu-ray (that I had to import from the US due to it ironically being unavailable here), and am happy to report that the new restoration looked as mesmerizing as I hoped it would. Maybe I’m a sucker for the Toronto location but genuinely think this is one of the most beautiful movies ever.
The anti-erotic, arthouse fantasy atmosphere of this has always drawn loose comparisons to Cronenberg and Lynch but I think mostly…
Watching the mystery slowly unravel was a stunning, captivating, yet utterly devastating experience I won’t soon forget.
“I’ve had too many special things taken away.”
Trauma is annular. Once the brain experiences a shock so prodigious, it is permanently altered in how it operates. Where there was once a way to escape from the pain of life, there is now an enclosed ellipse that manifests responses to this pain in a way that is unique for everybody, and someone who hasn’t experience it cannot possibly fathom its depths. One individual may externalize their trauma, expressing it openly, while another may retreat from the torment that plagues every moment of their life via a carefully constructed fantasy.
Animals who have lost their offspring will often take under their wing the young of another who either died, or were…
For a movie submerged in 90s softcore porn Cinemax vibes I was very pleasantly surprised by how warm and empathetic this ended up being. Early on we’re in a Leonard Cohen strip club and a horny guy with rancid, almost evil vibes is narrating as the last holdouts of The Wet Look rub their necks. His sleepy, brooding performance is the dark id hiding behind every guy who ever told you that you in particular would love Burning Man. But then in the next scene he’s getting chewed out by his boss for creeping out the customers. Okay great. That’s a rhythm I can jam on.
There’s a lot here to chew on about ritual, grief, artificiality, and lust. I…
There is an ethereal beauty to this movie that is hard to describe. Every line, every movement has an otherworldly mystique to it that feels so much like a dream, even though nothing fantastical or supernatural ever happens.
How can a movie centered around a strip club be this pure? Egoyan masterfully subverts our worst expectations in a way that made me feel guilty about my own mindset; maybe our misanthropic assumptions about each other aren't always warranted. Maybe there is hope for the human condition after all. We are all broken, complex. We all need each other for something and, paradoxically, our motivations can be simultaneously self-serving and altruistic.
Simply put, this is an immaculate work of cinematic art that always keeps me entranced from start to finish and leaves me heartbroken in the best way possible.
