Speaking Parts on blu-ray?!!!! (a review/ reflection)

...So I had some store credit amassed at Videomatica and was walking the wall the other day, looking to see what's come out that I've missed news of, that I might want to revisit and/or share with Erika. Trouble Every Day on blu-ray, perhaps? My favourite Claire Denis, of the ones I've seen, but so dark, so vicious, and it costs $50;  not cheap, and I don't really feel like seeing it again myself, so I'd be buying it just to put it on the shelf. Maybe not... here's an Anna Mae Wong box set, that could be interesting (Anthony Quinn is in all three films?), but - is anything on it by Tod Browning? I scan the back, then ask BJ if the store has Mark of the Vampire. Nope. No Takeshi Kitano, either; we established that earlier. I run my eyes over the foreign films, the classics, the cult films, the new arrivals... I used to spend so much time scanning the shelves at video stores, back when I was young and in Maple Ridge, endlessly walking the wall at Rogers Video, in particular - even before and after I worked there - sometimes just because I was lonely in Maple Ridge and had nowhere else to be, hoping for some way of connecting to people in those pre-internet days, but also because I was constantly looking for the movie I needed to see, one of the ones the store only got one copy of, y'know, unlike the wall of copies of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or Major League or...  

...and there it is, in the new arrivals, like it's waiting for me to notice: Atom Egoyan's Speaking Parts. Someone put out Speaking Parts on blu-ray?! Done! There are scenes of the film set, ironically enough, in a video store - Toronto's After Dark video - with plenty of Canadian content on display (the area by the desk in the film has Videodrome, The Brood, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Decline of the American Empire, Night Zoo, The Grey Fox and Hookers on Davie, all on vintage VHS; there's even Tavernier's Death Watch, a French production with an international cast, filmed in Wales, but thematically relevant to Speaking Parts, a bit, in that it is also interested in the way images are used, in the morality of video; self-conscious, self-reflexive cinema, not as poetic as Speaking Parts but another favourite from that time, from the days when cinema was interested in itself...

I don't even notice, as I pay the difference for Speaking Parts - which is also pretty expensive - that there are a ton of extras: early shorts, Sarabande, and two commentaries, one current (with Arsinée Khanjian) and one vintage, off the old full-frame DVD. This was one of the key films of my youth, probably my favourite film, certainly my favourite Canadian film, released in 1989, when I was 21 and hungrier than I'd ever been for new cinematic experiences, having finally figured out what I was interested in and where to find it. I went to see Speaking Parts, as I recall, multiple times to the Van East Cinema, located on Commercial Drive, a key cinema of my life, next door to where the Four Wings Cafe used to be - y'know, the place that had that great hot sauce to put on your chow mein, the one that Brian Fawcett wrote some of his book Cambodia at... It's like the Granville Book Company, in its way, one of those "missing tooth" locations in Vancouver, unforgettable, impossible not to think of when you see the traces left behind, like the double-S "Sam the Record Man" door handles on the building that used to hold Sam, now and forevermore gone...

I interviewed Gabrielle Rose a couple of times, even saw her on stage as Helena Blavatsky, but I never got up the guts to ask her about Speaking Parts. It might have happened if we hadn't been sitting face to face with each other, in public, during those interviews but what does one say about that scene? "Gee, Ms. Rose, it looks like you're really masturbating on camera! How exactly was that filmed? Are you really that good at faking an orgasm?" I mean, in its own way, it's a rather clearly precognitive moment - maybe obviously so, looking at where the culture was going, but (surely) not many people in real life, back in 1989, had masturbated on camera in front of a partner via a live video hookup. Who among us has not, now? One of the bravest scenes in Canadian cinema, ever, but YOU go ahead and ask her about it, I feckin' dare ya. 

Shit, I've saved a screencap of it and y'know what, I just can't include it here. Nope. You'll have to watch the film. Besides feeling weirdly protective of Ms. Rose's modesty, my computer only plays DVDs, not blus, so it would be off that old full-frame Asset DVD, which really, really does not do justice to how gorgeous a film this is. And yet for years, unless you had that European box set, this was the only way to see the film. No wonder I wasn't that impressed with it, last time I attempted to watch it - it looks like garbage this way. This is NOT the version you want!:

The cover for this new edition doesn't really do the film justice, makes it look like it's related somehow to Waking Life or something, but that's really not a big deal. I guess that does look a bit like Michael McManus (who I only know elsewise as Brent Taylor in that kinda bad, but still quite compelling, CBC TV movie, The Squamish Five).

...But the transfer is fantastic, and besides looking great on blu, the film itself remains compelling. You'll worry a bit at first - my wife did - about the mostly dialogue-free beginning, which uses unexplained images, juxtaposed against each other, to put the story in motion. There's the grieving woman watching video images of her dead brother... the obsessive hotel maid who is stalking her coworker, the vain actor-cum-gigolo who also is working at the same hotel... the cynical video store clerk who moonlights shooting kink parties and weddings... If the beginning of the film is a bit odd, the ending is even weirder, since various characters, including ones who don't have a firm grip on the real to begin with, begin to lose their grip, and Egoyan starts to present several images as video-within-video, distancing us from objective reality. It's not even clear at the end of the film what's happened to the Gabrielle Rose character; we understand that the climactic images that we see of her are hallucinatory, subjective, flashing back to Khanjian's lines about having the chance to save somebody and ignoring them instead.... but what DOES happen on the level of objective reality?  

In an odd way, it doesn't even matter. There is an unmistakable emotional and moral point reached in that Phil-Donahue-like talk show that resolves everything quite powerfully, even if certain questions about what is "actually" happening - as if anything in a non-documentary were "actual" - are left unresolved; we understand what it all means, even if we don't understand quite how we get there. And there's a final potent moment of apparent redemption for one-or-perhaps-two characters that is, for my money, every bit as powerful as the ending of Bresson's Pickpocket - y'know, the one that Paul Schrader serially plagiarizes, or, um, "pays homage" to?

(Hey, look, there's the big scene that I was shy about posting, in the background, but it is abstract enough that no one's modesty will be tarnished.)

Along the way, there's a quality of obsessiveness that was extreme for even other self-conscious cinema of its time. Characters speak to each other over video recordings of themselves speaking to each other. The image of an actor playing a brother replaces the image of the brother who is a replacement for a sister. Echoes of dialogue resonate in a closed chamber, some flat-out repeated, but in contexts so different you might not, on first viewing, even notice. Key characters from one scene appear in a completely different role (or as a background extra), as a kind of Brechtian distancing, with each moment in the film asking you to think about it in relationship with another moment, earlier; and yet the narrative has a strong enough momentum, has powerful enough emotion behind it, that you're constantly engaged, don't necessarily even notice that the video store customer behind Khanjian actually was the lead actor in the film she was watching on video from that very store in a previous shot - the man with the speaking part is now an extra, and the man who was an extra now has a speaking part... Egoyan rewards you if you are paying close attention, but he also offers a gripping story for those of us who just want that, maybe made a little less self-conscious in that the main medium of consumption is no longer the VHS tape (which I also owned, and watched more than once, of course...). 

I turned to Erika after the film and asked her, "What was that movie the other week we watched, where someone got redeemed by their stalker?" I think I actually was thinking of Boxing Helena, there, which I wrote about last week... it's from a few years later (1993), but still more or less from this time period; it's weird to find ourselves back in this pocket of time, cinematically, so soon thereafter, but it was an exciting time in cinema history, when there was a sort of small pocket of filmmakers out there, some of whom are quite established now, who were earnestly asking questions about what they were doing, and challenging audiences to do the same. I don't think there are many filmmakers out there asking you to think about film quite as sincerely as Egoyan used to; I can see why I watched Speaking Parts again and again, back then, and am very grateful to Canadian International for having put it out in this terrific new transfer. People just don't make movies quite like this anymore. Not even Atom Egoyan! Beau is Afraid proves that somehow, weirdly, arthouse cinema still can cross over into mainstream attention, is still viable, but even that film, fresh as it is, seems like a throwback to a more earnest, more challenging time. Speaking Parts is an authentic representative of that time. I wonder how it will play to people who have never seen the inside of a VHS rental store?

Erika liked it too!