‘Seven Veils’: Toronto Review

Dir/scr: Atom Egoyan. Canada. 2023. 108mins

Seven Veils is far from the first film to explore how art imitates life, but Atom Egoyan’s take on a familiar theme is so feverish that one can’t help being swept up in its mad vision. Reuniting with his Chloe star Amanda Seyfried, the Canadian filmmaker follows a young theatre director who is staging ’Salome’, revising a version that her mentor and clandestine lover launched years earlier. Appropriate considering the source material, this intense psychodrama about buried trauma and doomed romance demonstrates an unapologetic operatic flair which entrances and over-reaches in equal measure. Seyfried exudes a stark intensity that grounds the proceedings — whenever Egoyan risks losing control, she keeps the production on course.

Will entice viewers who enjoy messy, idiosyncratic personal cinema

Premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, Seven Veils will appeal to arthouse crowds and opera fans, a group that includes Egoyan, a veteran opera director who mounted his first production of ’Salome’ in 1996. Seyfried adds star power to a picture that will probably inspire a wide range of responses from critics — which will only further entice viewers who enjoy messy, idiosyncratic personal cinema. 

As Seven Veils begins, Jeanine (Seyfried) is introduced at a press conference as the director of an ambitious remounting of ’Salome’, with the press noting how, more than a decade ago, she served as the assistant on a previous interpretation of the iconic Richard Strauss work by a visionary artist named Charles at the same opera house. What’s left unsaid — beyond Jeanine’s lack of experience directing opera — is that she was having an affair with Charles before his death, a loss that she has never gotten over. Determined to stage a production that is equally  groundbreaking, Jeanine throws herself into rehearsals, although she discovers that her romantic past (as well as emotionally scarring childhood memories) are creeping into this staging, blurring the line between ’Salome’ and her own life.

Egoyan has cast actual opera singers from a recent ’Salome’ for Seven Veils, which gives the film an instant authenticity. Ambur Braid is forceful as Ambur, the performer who will play ’Salome’, while Michael Kupfer-Radecky radiates contemptuous superiority as Johan, the opera’s ill-fated John the Baptist. While Seven Veils focuses primarily on Jeanine’s uneasy journey into her past — and her rocky marriage to Paul (Mark O’Brien), whoi is having an affair — several of the people around her are also facing personal crossroads. For instance, Clea (Rebecca Liddiard), a fresh-faced prop master, is dating Rachel (Vinessa Antoine), Ambur’s discouraged understudy who fears she’ll never receive her big break. Clea’s problems only multiply when Johan starts to make unwanted advances that put her in an awkward situation at work.

’Salome’’s romantic desire and brutal catharsis are echoed by Seven Veils’ juicy, sometimes overwrought mini-dramas, with Jeanine confronting a painful past that keeps playing out during rehearsals. As she offers exacting instructions to her performers, she seems to be reliving (and, in some ways, reshaping) what happened to her. Flashbacks shot in the style of home movies offer clues into her damaging upbringing. Clearly, Jeanine views Salome as a tragedy about star-crossed lovers who orchestrated their own undoing, and she’s inextricably drawn to this opera, not so much directing it as channelling its stormy emotions. Charles is long dead, but she cannot let him go — perhaps remounting ’Salome’ is a way of bringing him back to life?

Seyfried might have been tempted to deliver a megawatt performance, but while the character certainly goes to extremes, the actress is mostly dialled down, creating a fascinating tension as Jeanine appears to be  tightly controlled while slowly shattering. As in the psychological thriller Chloe, Seyfried approaches the potentially overheated material with a gripping realism. No matter how obsessive and fragile Jeanine gets, she comes across as a believable, albeit extraordinarily complicated, individual.

Not all of Egoyan’s digressions and subplots work. A commentary on #MeToo feels tacked-on, while some of the backstage dramas involving understudies and nosy podcasters detract rather than add to the colourful tapestry of the opera world. The actual ’Salome’ staging is a minimalist wonder, and Mychael Danna’s score creates elegant tension and a sense of mental fragmentation. Much like his protagonist, Egoyan seems to be pouring so much of himself into the work, grappling with the ways in which the act of creation can heal or re-injure those who devote their lives to it.