Seven Veils Review: A Top-Drawer Amanda Seyfried Leads Atom Egoyan’s Intriguing But Uneven Backstage Drama
First premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, it’s art imitating art that mirrors Jeanine’s life as a stage director in Seven Veils, which marks the reunion of Atom Egoyan and Amanda Seyfried after 2009’s underrated erotic thriller Chloe. Seyfried plays the aforementioned protagonist, who is in charge of overseeing the Canadian Opera Company production of Salome following the death of her mentor and creator. She’s young and ambitious and she isn’t interested in being a work for hire directing an opera. She wants to add her own artistic stamp into the Salome production, which she insists is just some minor changes.
But the top-level management wants their opera to remain as faithful as it is to what Seyfried’s late mentor originally envisioned. Egoyan, who previously directed the Salome opera back in 1996, uses the production as thematic canvases to explore Jeanine’s repressed trauma during her childhood days. The movie would alternate between the present and the past, where the latter is presented in a series of fragmented flashbacks revolving around her father shooting little Jeanine dancing with a DV camera.
Jeanine’s involvement in the Salome production draws parallels with her own past, suggesting sexual abuse that keeps haunting her both personally and professionally. Her life back home isn’t any better with her mother, Margot (Lynne Griffin) suffering from dementia. And if that’s not enough, she suspects her estranged husband, Paul (Mark O’Brien) is having an affair with her mother’s caregiver Dimitra (Maia Jae Bastidas).
The movie also speaks a lot about creative control and freedom of expression that Jeanine is fighting hard to find the right balance between honouring her late mentor’s work and putting her own touches. But dealing with bureaucracy remains her biggest setback, evidently in her never-ending friction with her late mentor’s wife Beatrice (Lanette Ware), who manages the opera company. Jeanine also has to put up with her temperamental leading man Johann, played by real-life baritone Michael Kupfer-Radecky, who previously appeared in Egoyan’s aforementioned stage production.
Egoyan also slips in some subplots with one of them revolving around Clea (Rebecca Liddiard), the prop master who is supposed to make a fake Johann’s head to be used for a decapitation scene during the Salome opera. He does something which immediately makes her uncomfortable and she happens to have the whole incident recorded on her phone, which is originally meant to document her behind-the-scenes work. The evidence allows her to come forward and expose Johann’s behaviour to the top-level management.
As much as I understand Egoyan’s depiction of #MeToo subject meant to encompass his relatable themes of abuse of power, depravity and trauma, I still can’t help but feel her otherwise related story oddly detached from Seyfried’s Jeanine’s arc, despite Liddiard’s strong supporting performance. Somehow it works better as an individual story of its own rather than serving as a connective tissue to the overall movie.
This, in turn, made Seven Veils looking disjointed due to Egoyan’s insistence in piling up his movie with one subplot after another. If only he zeroes in primarily on Jeanine’s point of view and how her character overcomes the ordeal between handling the work pressure and the domestic problem.
No doubt that Seyfried does a great job portraying a traumatic career woman who suffered in silence. She brings enough subtlety to her role without resorting to histrionics, opting for a more effective, less-is-more performance when it comes to displaying her varied emotions. It is easily one of Seyfried’s best roles to date, that her overall layered portrayal is the reason that keeps me engaged even with some of the hiccups in the movie. Seven Veils is far from Egoyan’s best but it has its few moments backed by Seyfried’s impressive acting prowess.
