James Y. Lee
Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils is an deeply fascinating example of the ways that a filmmaker’s life seeps into the text of their work, primarily because the context of Seven Veils‘ thematic centerpiece requires explanation of the opera it’s about. Richard Strauss’s opera, Salome—adapted from the Oscar Wilde play of the same title, itself adapted from the gospel story of the titular Jewish princess and stepdaughter of King Herod—has been a part of the fold of Egoyan’s career for quite some time, with his first directorial encounter with the work having taken place in 1996. When the Canadian Opera Company announced their remounting of Salome in 2023, which Egoyan would be directing once again, Egoyan had already conceptualized what Seven Veils would be, and then integrated the film’s production into the fabric of Egoyan’s operatic work, with Seven Veils being shot alongside his production of Salome, featuring many of the same actors who would be part of the remounted opera. It becomes readily apparent upon watching Seven Veils that this was not a task that Egoyan took lightly—the film is deeply heady, tackling themes of appropriation and agency over traumatic narratives, and how art is often used as a conduit to parse that trauma—and that, although it never seems interested in providing a moment of rattling or satisfying catharsis, Egoyan has somewhat regained a handle on sustaining intrigue and suspense, even as some threads of the story cohere less than others.
Egoyan’ films deal heavily in ways that our trauma manifests beyond repression, exercising a control over a deeply human frequency in the ways we respond to the worst moments of our lives. Standing at the forefront of Egoyan’s filmography are two works; The Sweet Hereafter, a potent demonstration of the ways that an entire community is rattled awake by the loss of dozens of children in a tragic school bus crash, and Exotica, a retroactively structured film whose ostensible narrative about various unrelated stories centered on a strip club powerfully unveils the various coping mechanisms we turn to so we can bury the grief we hold over the things we’ve lost. Seven Veils shares common ground with these works, more so than most Egoyan films have in years, although its emotional crux is less about grief and more about the ways through which art can allow us to process the harm done to us over years, by the people we trust, by the institutions we exist in.
Salome is a tale of intersecting taboos and desires, charting out two obsessions in great detail to a deeply violent conclusion—that of Salome’s desire for John the Baptist, who has been imprisoned by Herod, and of Herod’s own desire for Salome. Both of them culminate in the seductive “dance of the seven veils” that Salome is made to perform for Herod for the reward of John the Baptist’s head, which is the only way that Salome knows she will be able to satisfy her own desire for John the Baptist. For an opera that deals its hand so heavily in confronting the unattainable and desiring what is impossible to possess, there’s a heavy load of trauma that its characters bring with them—something that Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried), the new director of a fresh remounting of Salome, seems to understand on an unsettlingly intuitive level.
All throughout Jeanine’s process of creating this new production of Salome, we slowly begin to understand the kind of hold that this opera has possessed, not just over her career, but also over her past. Jeanine is the direct successor to the late Charles, whose previous mounting of Salome was such a success for the opera company that Jeanine’s only tasked prerogative is to preserve his vision—a vision that seems to have intertwined with not only an affair that Charles had with Jeanine, but also Jeanine’s history of seemingly being abused by her own father at a young age, even as he was among the first to push her in the direction of the theatrical arts. When Jeanine suggests the idea of her making “small but meaningful changes” to Charles’s vision of Salome, her superiors in the opera company immediately balk at the notion, even rejecting her own director’s statement from being included in the program. Jeanine’s personal life is undergoing its own troubles, with her mother (Lynne Griffin) suffering from dementia, and her husband (Mark O’Brien) sleeping with her mother’s caregiver. All the while, as Jeanine clashes with the leads of the opera (played by actual opera singers Ambur Braid and Michael Kupfer-Radecky), it becomes apparent the ways that she sees herself in Salome’s tormented desires, given Jeanine’s insistence pouring out in every piece of emotional direction she delivers to rehearsals.
On its face, this is the kind of silently impactful, formally rigorous tormented-artist-type film we’ve seen in the past—most recently and prominently with the likes of Todd Field’s Tár, a similar exploration of the world of classical music, but from the perspective of an abuser whose control of power manifests in her approach to art. Here, Egoyan opts to take the opposite route, utilizing a similar breed of clinical precision and occasionally unsettling nonlinearity to express the ways through which Jeanine’s process is plagued by her past of victimhood, but simultaneously how that might serve as an asset for her dedication to seeing this remounting of Salome through. The film utilizes narration to offer Jeanine interiority via devices like the lines in the opera, or her own musings on the hold that Charles has had over her career, and still does now. Details like a podcast recording where a host needles her for information on her lives with both Charles and her father bring her closer to the edge. Footage that her father recorded of her dancing is seen getting utilized in recordings of Charles’s production of Salome, displaying how the modes through which Jeanine’s past is documented are repurposed, recontextualized, and perhaps even doubled over in their traumatic impact.
Egoyan brings back cinematographer Paul Sarossy and composer Mychael Danna, both of whom pull off some of their most understated work yet. Sarossy frames the intrigue of the rehearsal process and the grandiosity of Egoyan’s own staging for Salome (depicted here, of course, as Jeanine’s own ideas) with deliberate movements and blocking, while Danna’s unsettlingly low-key score knows better than to compete with the sheer power of Strauss’s operatic prowess. Formally speaking, Seven Veils sees Egoyan working on his most refined frequency since 2009’s Chloe—and it’s no surprise that the star of that film, Seyfried herself, brings a different breed of quiet, deeply complex torment to Jeanine in this film, persistently impressing on the audience the burdensome weight this trauma has held on her, her need to reclaim her story via her production of Salome, and the strength of will it takes for her to persist through a production that asks her to repress it further.
Charted in the background of Seven Veils‘ narrative is a subplot involving propmaster Clea (Rebecca Liddard), who’s recording her process of crafting the head of John the Baptist, and is eventually groped by his actor, Johan, while using his head as a cast for the prop. The act, too, is recorded, and she elects to show the footage to the opera company, whose immediate instinct is to deem it staged, but the dilemma is between if the footage will implicate the company, or if Clea keeps the abuse on the down-low in exchange for having her girlfriend Rachel (Vinessa Antoine) replace Ambur as Salome—an interesting thread of how abuse and power are leveraged that feels out of place relative to the intensive nature of Jeanine’s character drama, only related via tangential thematic relevance rather than immediate narrative impact. Sans this particular narrative thread and some dragged-out moments of operatic prowess in Egoyan’s depictions of his/Jeanine’s Salome, however, it becomes hard to deny that Seven Veils is the most thought-through work that the director’s delivered in decades, seeing him return to form as one of our most forefront inquisitors of the role that trauma plays in our lives, and the devices we use to obscure, or perhaps even bring to the forefront, the weight it bears on our day-to-day—which brings with it a powerful refusal to tie anything up in clean answers.
