Repressed memories and grand opera are dance partners in ‘Seven Veils’
“Seven Veils” — 2.5 stars
In “Seven Veils,” Amanda Seyfried puts her wide, unblinking eyes to good use as a woman staring at the present and unable to see anything but the past. The actress plays Jeanine, a theater director mounting a production of the Richard Strauss opera “Salome” that increasingly reflects her childhood trauma, to the confusion of Jeanine’s cast, crew, family and friends. The movie’s tension is built on an uncertainty: Is this a portrait of an artist having a nervous breakdown or the story of a woman using art to confront and exorcise her demons?
Heady stuff, made headier by the interlacing of repressed memories and biblical myth, the passion of grand opera and the banal grubbiness of offstage life. Behind it all looms a history of men pulling women’s strings in ways that they call adoration but that constitute abuse, and behind THAT is Atom Egoyan, the prolific Canadian writer-director whose films insistently feature characters digging up emotions and past sins that other characters wish they’d leave in peace.
Egoyan hit a commercial and critical peak with 1997’s “The Sweet Hereafter,” about a rural community in the aftermath of a deadly school bus crash, but he has worked steadily since then, and “Seven Veils” is very much of a piece with his recent work: studied, cool, empathetic and intellectualized. Egoyan directed a notable production of “Salome” for the Canadian Opera Company in 1996, and he availed himself of a 2023 remounting to weave a new story in and around the staging, using its sets and singers.
In the film, Jeanine is not just directing “Salome,” she’s re-creating a 1990s production by her late mentor Charles, whose widow (Lanette Ware) runs the Toronto-based opera company and who expects Jeanine to follow his staging to the letter. Jeanine has her own ideas, some of them relating to her long-ago affair with the much-older Charles and some of them to do with her late father (Ryan McDonald), who videotaped her as a child in creepy playacting videos that the film returns to as a kind of trauma bubble. It’s implied but never stated that Jeanine was sexually abused, and the lines between the dead mentor and the dead parent seem purposely blurred, especially when we learn that Charles used Jeanine’s memories as visual fodder for the earlier “Salome.”
As if that weren’t enough, “Seven Veils” adds a few more layers of plot — maybe seven in total; I lost count. Jeanine’s marriage is falling apart over Zoom, with her feckless husband (Mark O’Brien) openly carrying on with the caregiver (Maia Jae Bastidas) of Jeanine’s mother (Lynne Griffin), whose dementia conveniently provides cover for her failure to protect her daughter in childhood. The production’s prop master, Clea (Rebecca Liddiard), has her own drama going on, including fending off the advances of Johann (German baritone Michael Kupfer-Radecky), the opera’s arrogant John the Baptist, while trying to get her understudy lover (Vinessa Antoine) into the lead role of Salome. On top of all this, everyone in the opera company, from the higher-ups to the lowly stagehands, is looking askance at Jeanine’s changes to the production.
And for good reason, since those changes seem designed to mirror and induce childhood memories of her father while putting to rest her issues with the overbearing Charles. Seyfried doesn’t often get a role this complex, and she largely rises to the challenge of playing a creative, feeling woman trying to process volcanic emotions at the risk of becoming consumed by them. Egoyan uses Strauss’ 1905 opera, based on an 1891 play by Oscar Wilde, as the raw clay for Jeanine’s psychological melodrama as well as the film’s larger themes, with the onstage Salome (played by Canadian soprano Ambur Braid) a stand-in for her director’s explorations of guilt, complicity, sorrow and rage.
It’s a heady stew, as I said, and it’s to the filmmaker’s credit that he keeps all the balls in the air for as long as he does. “Seven Veils” doesn’t crash to Earth, but it also never quite frees itself from the notebook of its ideas to become the gripping emotional thriller it seems to want to be. Less might have been more — but less wouldn’t have been Atom Egoyan.
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Unrated but contains intimations of incest. 107 minutes.