Dir. Atom Egoyan
Scr. Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Russell Banks
Starring Ian Holm, Maury Chaykin, Gabrielle Rose, Peter Donaldson
Rated M15+, 110 min.
Screening at Palace's Verona and Norton Street Cinemas, Roseville cinemas and Village, Double Bay, the Walker, North Sydney

Too many cinematic families are unhappy, everyone lolling around in there misery and trauma. Hollywood, the place we turn to for unrealistic models of family unity gives us the two up two down where the kids talk through their hair and the parents talk to their lovers. Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina with "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." If perhaps once true, now the opposite prevails. Taking the cinematic family as the best reflection of the true family, are we all marred in the moors of a troubling similarity? All the arguments, affairs and tragedies play themselves out again and again, as in life, as in cinema. The same melodramas or dissafection dull us. So how to represent the fragile distance between people? In The Sweet Hereafter Atom Egoyan has perfected the technique of narrative fragmentation, or perhaps found the most applicable story for it.

Left: Bruce Greenwood as Billy Ansell
As far as all the usual points of discussion go, they are secure. The performances, photography and direction are all flawless. Particular mention should be made of Sarah Polley, Ian Holm and once again Bruce Greenwood, who plays characters of silence and torment perfectly. What truly makes this film great, springing out of these identifiable points of reference, is Egoyan's scope and ambition. The film is minute, gently paced and delicate, yet has the intimate detail and overall effect of Coppola circa The Godfather. And even more astonishingly, the story itself is worthy of A Current Affair. Infantcide is one of the least appealing topics imaginable, instantly sensationl and melodramatic, but Egoyan counters such tendencies with a style as deliberate and studied as Antonioni or Cronenberg. From the outset we know the bus is doomed, and we work backward while constantly remaining aware of the present. Egoyan dissects the past to arrive at the conclusion. He is an artist of analysis. By giving us so much pain stretched across so much time, he overwhelms us. We see all his connections, perhaps make our own as well. Every detail is crucial, every character vital.

This highly structured aesthetic also shows up the distances, the unbearable loss. The gap between Holm and his daughter, then and now. The mindlessly happy bus driver, before after the crash. The cross-cutting unites as it fragments. Yet Egoyan's controlled style is never flashy or distant, the exactitude of form highlights the pain within. Never is this truer than in the relationship between Nicole, one of the few who survives the crash, and her father Sam. When we first see them casually talking they could be lovers, but the film reveals the true nature of the relationship as it progresses. The closeness and distance between a father and daughter will decide the fate of the film, and will remain when we have gone. The pause between them in that cold, dark night is the key to the film. It is the moment of decision.

Right: Gabrille Rose as Dolores Driscoll
Before the accident, people had their secrets, ther opinions and tales to tell. The community was born out of the individuals conception of it, and only to the journalistic eye would these assortments find any type of coherence. The poem that is the mythic framework for the film, Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin, is fully formed, unlike the community it is set against. The poem has identifiable heroes and villians, and a pityful victim. In Egoyan's world all identifiable signs are rendered useless. There is no easy explanation, and when closure comes, it feels odd and incomplete. The personal, the bus crash, is decided by the private life of Nicole and Sam. There is no community to dissipate, only a tragedy to reveal the ever present weaknesses. A crucial scene comes early, when Holm talks to the parents of one of the children who has died in the accident. When asked what other parents would be willing to assist the case, he systematically goes from family to family, picking up on their secrets, their frailties. The accident forces the private out into the public sphere, it requires a reason and a figure of blame. When one is found, it is obviously untrue. We move through so many points of view, so many perspectives that the film avoids feeble closure yet transcends the need for it and becomes so much more. It goes beyond blame and answers, beyond reasoning why such things happen. It charts the attempt to understand the impenetrable, and that is enough.

Below: Sarah Polley as Nicole Burnell
The film is so unified and dazzling that you see it as an endless paragraph, the perfect argument leading to an expected conclusion. Yet there are two moments that stick with me in particular. The crash is built up so skillfully that when it suddenly occurs, in long shot, a yellow dot dissapearing into white, you double take. The film prepares you for it for so long, yet we are still overwhelmed at the horror, beauty and speed of the act. The event goes beyond what we can, or want, to expect. The other moment occurs just after this, and is perhaps the greatest example of the brilliance of Egoyan's technique. Holm recounts a story where his daughter is stung by a bee and cannot breathe. As they rush to the hospital he is told he must perform a tracheotomy. We are not frightened for the well-being of the child, we know she will survive, but terrified of the act itself. How could a father, with all his love of his child, do that? Even if saves her life, how can he force himself to hurt her? He waits for her to faint, but as the camera slowly zooms in she looks at us non-plussed, unable to grasp what happens to her. It is the most eloquent metaphor for the relationship between parents and their children imaginable, so powerful because it devastates us emotionally before it reviles us physically. Between that face and the anguished face of Holm is the aforementioned moment of decision. She looks at the face of her father, who holds her life in his hands. The Sweet Hereafter? Darkness, confusion, love, inaction, hope, happiness, betrayal. Then silence.

Adam Rivett
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