Exotica (1994, Canadian)

Exotica is all about recontextualizing the object of desire, constantly reworking the moment of impact, the point at which one event happened that altered many lives. In Atom Egoyan's breakthrough film, a small group of people revolve around such a single point in time. Egoyan shows us, slowly, the margins of this point without ever fully explaining the center. Instead he plays around it, investing the event with a sense of monumental importance in part because we can never know the entire story, and can only interpret for ourselves.

The main players are Francis (Bruce Greenwood), a tax man grieving for someone lost, Christina (Mia Kirshner), a stripper performing a nightly schoolgirl routine, Eric (Elias Koteas), the MC at Christina's strip joint, and Thomas (Don McKellar), a pet-store owner whose external view on the others helps the audience understand what's going on, how Francis, Christina and Eric are all locked into an endless cycle of grief and denial. In many ways it is as if their lives ended on a day several years past, and all they can do is attempt to rework it, get it right this time. It's a dramatic work of understatement, while at the same time an exploration of how loss affects a community as much as it does any one individual.