Seven Veils
Directed and Written by Atom Egoyan
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, & Douglas Smith
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hours, 47 minutes
In theaters March 7

by Laurence Boag-Matthews, Staff Writer

Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils is an interesting and highly creative project that incorporates footage and staging from the director’s own 2023 Canadian Opera Company production of Salome into the narrative of the film, but it’s hard for the viewer to really penetrate its hard surfaces.

The film follows the process of staging an opera mainly from the perspective of Amanda Seyfried’s character Jeanine - the opera’s director - who we learn was passed the mantle of directing Salome by her deceased mentor Charles. The production is a revival of his earlier version that Jeanine herself had worked on as a student, and throughout the film we receive hints towards her past trauma associated with the production and her mentor, as well as her father. The narrative involves not only Jeanine’s personal and professional journey but incorporates entanglements of the opera’s cast and crew as well as a generous helping of metatheatre to explore themes around the nature of authorship and adaptation, abuse and trauma, and the complex power dynamics involved in creative projects. The film is therefore thematically very dense, and due to the sheer amount of theme and story threads it does not always quite come together successfully. Whilst we follow Seyfried for the majority of the film, the major subplot concerns Clea (Rebecca Liddiard), the prop-master of the opera house, and her various involvements with the cast of the opera and the power dynamics wherein. Egoyan packs a lot of ideas into this subplot, which ultimately leads it to become a bit confused and at times feel as if it is competing with rather than complementing the main story.

Egoyan’s use of the opera performers from his stage production as the performers in the film-version makes sense and allows the rehearsal and performance scenes to closely adhere to the reality of opera as we can hear them performing for real on the set itself. The performers playing Jochanaan (Michael Kupfer-Radecky) and Salome (Ambur Braid) in the production are not primarily screen actors, so unfortunately, they are the weaker links in the cast when not performing on the opera stage. For a film concerned with the abuse of women by powerful men, the male characters are the weakest - which is not necessarily a flaw. However, the mysterious Charles is perhaps the strongest-written of the male characters and he is dead before the beginning of the film - metaphorically lurking behind Jeanine and the entire production. We develop an intriguing picture of him through discussions in the film and the ways his intention for the staging and direction have been inherited by Jeanine. The vague suggestions of Charles and Jeanine’s relationship prior to his death, and the way this informs her direction of the production are the most compelling elements of the film. Seyfried is front and centre - she is truly the heart of the project, and expertly conveys the layers of repression and denial which begin to unravel over the course of the film. As the production comes together and behind the scenes Jeanine’s circumstances start to become clearer, her dramatic choices for the opera start to reveal what is brewing beneath the surface. Her character arc thematically reflects the veils of the opera and the film’s title itself. Seyfried’s performance allows us to access the depth of the threads connecting Jeanine’s vision of Salome and her character’s psyche without being too heavy-handed, though incorporating opera into a narrative perhaps allows an audience to accept more heightened dramatic elements a little more easily than we would in other cases.

Overall, there is immense creativity on show from Egoyan, to develop and stage a whole opera as well as a feature film as ambitious as Seven Veils in the same year is no mean feat. While the film ultimately feels a little over-stuffed leading to some murkiness in the themes and ideas, it is always preferable when films try to incorporate too many ideas rather than too few. There are clearly parallels to be made between Jeanine as the director and protagonist, and Egoyan himself - the film is an interesting device for him to be able to give voice to the intent behind his directorial choices made in the production of Salome. If nothing else, the film is definitely a creative diversion from the usual making-of documentary we may expect accompanying a stage project.

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