Smorgasbord That Never Adds Up To A Square Meal

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday February 10, 2000

Sandra Hall

FELICIA'S JOURNEY

Written and directed by Atom Egoyan from the novel by William Trevor

Rated M

Dendy Opera Quays

Felicia, a young Irish girl, arrives in the British city of Birmingham, hoping to find the boy who loved her and left her pregnant. Instead, she meets sad, spooky Ambrose Hilditch, a middle-aged bachelor who has a habit of befriending drifters like Felicia. ``Lost girls," he calls them, and as he sees it, it's his duty to help them on their way to a better place. He's a man with a pronounced fondness for the euphemism, is Mr. Hilditch.

He was created by the Irish novelist William Trevor, who portrayed him with chilling delicacy, as if describing something under glass. The Hilditch who emerges in Egyptian-born Canadian director Atom Egoyan's film of Trevor's book is a more robust figure. Hitchcock might have invented him after an evening with the Brothers Grimm. If Felicia is the Red Riding Hood of the story, Hilditch is wolf and witch combined. No, he doesn't eat his victims. Cannibalism is not on the menu although Egoyan serves up the film's copious references to food and its preparation with such mordant relish that anything seems possible.

Trevor's Hilditch patronised motorway cafes; Egoyan's is a gourmet, whose dead mother was a celebrated TV chef, known to her fans as Gala. Exuberantly played by Egoyan's regular collaborator, Arsinee Khanjian, she still speaks to her son in fruity Franglais every night via the VCR, since she's left him tapes of all her old shows, which he watches while preparing his elaborate evening meals.

Video has always played an important part in Egoyan's stories. In his early films, Next of Kin and Family Viewing, he explored his notion that the camera is an instrument which enshrines sentiment and in so doing, diminishes even trivialises the experience it's recording. And he returns to the idea here. In reality, Hilditch's Mommie dearest either ignored or bullied him as a child. But filtered through the video lens, she can be re-imagined as somebody altogether more loving.

It's a clever premise, but unfortunately it doesn't play nearly as well as it might. Gala's performance loses its flavour after a while, degenerating into ham acting. Her high camp style also starts to infect the whole movie with results which do nothing for the mood of foreboding that Egoyan is working so desperately hard to build up.

It's a film with so many elements that the centre doesn't hold. Intercut with the main theme are flashbacks to Felicia's home in Ireland and videotapes of Hilditch's victims recorded as they sat in his Morris Minor innocently regaling him with poignant episodes of their life stories. Interestingly, offcuts from these tapes make up one of the exhibits in the tribute to Alfred Hitchcock now showing at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, and there they produce a much more sinister effect than they achieve in the film itself.

Even so, it has its moments. Elaine Cassidy's Felicia takes on the pathos of a runaway foal as she totters in platform soles across the bleak expanses of Birmingham's industrial estates on the cold trail of her feckless lover. And Bob Hoskins is a perfectly cast Hilditch, his comfortable bulk offset by a beady-eyed expression which can change from friendly concern to predatory wickedness in a single blink. But I'm not sure where he got his accent, which sounds as if he's auditioning for Fagin in Oliver Twist.

It's strained, as is Egoyan's direction, and this is a let down, for his last film, The Sweet Hereafter, conjured up such an enveloping impression of the snowbound community in which it was set that you could almost feel the temperature dropping in the cinema. In contrast, Hilditch's Birmingham remains a foreign country. Not that it isn't thoroughly explored. We're given lingering shots of the towering brick chimneys which line his route to work, and treated to assorted glimpses of him going about his job as a factory catering manager dedicated to the improvement of the steamed pudding and the sausage roll, but I always felt like a tourist and I fancy that Egoyan, who's never filmed in Britain before, did, too. He tries too hard. Adding yet another culinary metaphor to the film's lavish smorgasbord, I'd say he's overegged the pudding.