First I want to define what I mean by plot and story time. They are two different things in regards to film. The story is the entire narrative of the film, including events which are depicted and events which are inferred by the viewer. The plot is what happens during the present time that the film occurs in. The difference is that story covers everything within the film, both presumed and inferred, while the plot only covers what is visually presented within the film.
Now many of Atom Egoyan's films manipulate story and plot time. In Adoration, the films is cut between four different events. The first is the protagonist, Simon, presenting his story to the class. The second is the fiction world which Simon is narrating, his mother at an airport. The third is the discussion of the story over the internet, this group of people have been lead to believe that the story is real. The fourth is the life of Simon's Uncle Tom who takes care of him. The fifth follows Simon's teacher, Sabine, who promotes Simon to write the story. The film cuts between the different situations attempting to explain why Simon wrote his story and its effects on society. In the film, Simon writes a story for his French class about how his father was the man who tried to bomb a plane with his pregnant mother on board because she was pregnant with him. The entire process of the intercutting builds up into the truth of the lie and the reason behind the story. I enjoyed this mainly because the film explicitly explains the viewer that the story is fake. The time of the film is highly loose and as we see him first presenting the story, then talking about it with with friends, the the growth of the story into the effect of the event he based the story on. Egoyan brilliantly built the film so that we were always reminded of the beginning of the story.
I say this film reminds me of Sixth Sense because of how ambiguous the beginning and the ending of the films are. In the beginning of Adoration, we see a woman on a boardwalk over the water playing a violin with a small child watching out. We then cut to airport security finding explosives in a womans purse who had no idea that it was there. I compare this to the Sixth Sense in that the opening becomes overlooked through the rest of the film until the end. In the sixth sense, we see Bruce Willis' character in his home, with another man breaking in holding a gun. We later cut away to the present time of the film. We get so taken away by the story that we ignore the first information we are given. I will not explain the endings in fear of spoiling the films to other, but both revert back to explaining its significance in regards to other information.
Atom Egoyan's film have always been ambiguous and structured in a specific style that manipulates the narrative for specific reasons. A good example of this can be seen in Calendar (1993) and Chloe (2009). With Calendar, Egoyan creates a rhythm which jumps between three events in the story. The first is a voice on an answering machine, the second is a trip to Armenia he takes with his wife for work, and the third is a reoccuring date in which the male, played by Atom Egoyan, is having the same dinner with different women. The structure builds into this final explanation of how the events are circular in time but co-dependent in the way they present facts about the events of the film we infer. With Chloe, the events themselves are lies. The information that Chloe, played by Amanda Seyfried gives is false but always inferred as being the truth. The fantasy of seduction becomes the driving force in the film while the meaning of the stories becomes less about the husband she is describing, played by Liam Neeson, and more about the effect the information has on the wife, played by Julianne Moore. The narrative then presents Chloe as this seductress who controls the family she has essentially asked to break up. What becomes significant however about Chloe is that her stories, the fantasies of sex, provoke the viewer to ignore the obvious bluff and indulge themselves in the story like the wife does.
Adoration, with its significant use of the lie, directs the viewer past the lie rather then entrap them in it. The viewer is made aware constantly through the film that the kids story is a lie. The important thing about this understanding is that the viewer is being asked to examine the effects of the story. The four different events which are intertwined become view points for the different effects of the story. Viewing the effects of the story while understanding its fake gives the three main characters a higher position within the film because they can debate its importance. Whether there is one outside the film itself is also debatable, but less important because the film ends with the destruction of the original lie. When the child burns his grandfathers things its because his grandfather was the first person to lie to him. The film is still ambiguous because we as viewers can never definitively know what happened to his parents, but we take account of the multiple stories and understand that the truth we really want will never be available.
I highly recommend the viewing of Adoration for anyone who is interested. This film is listed as number 8 on my top 10 films list.
