SPEAKING PARTS
I suspect that when the definitive social history of the last half of the 20th century is written, the chapter on influences and causes will revolve around a single word: video. From the cradle to the rest home, the tube blares its unceasing mixture of entertainment, comedy, alleged reportage–in the words of All That Heaven Allows, a 1955 Douglas Sirk film, “drama, comedy, life’s parade at your fingertips.”
Egoyan has spoken of exploring the difference between producers and consumers of images, and the power relationship between these two groups. His characters in Speaking Parts are organized almost schematically along these lines, with one person of each sex occupying each of three levels of power. At the bottom level are Lance (Michael McManus), a hotel housekeeper, aspiring actor, and occasional extra, and Lisa (Arsinee Khanjian), who works with him in the hotel and loves him obsessively. Because her love is unrequited, she rents every movie he appears in, viewing them again and again. At the next level are Clara (Gabrielle Rose), a writer whose autobiographical story of herself and her brother is being made into a movie, and Eddy (Tony Nardi), a video-store clerk who also tapes weddings and parties. At the top are the hotel’s housekeeping supervisor, who as a sideline enlists some of her employees, including Lance, as prostitutes for hotel guests; and a TV and movie producer, a darkly hilarious, grotesque parody of the hard-boiled mogul. These two have power because they’re the actual creators–one of bedroom scenes, the other of films and TV shows–though their work must also satisfy others. But the producer can assume, as he says, that what pleases him will please the audience, and his position allows him the occasional error in that regard; whereas Eddy must tape only what he is hired to tape, and Clara is powerless to prevent the producer’s changes in her script. At the lowest level, Lance must read lines others have written for him, while Lisa is reduced to worshiping Lance’s video image.
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This is conveyed most strongly in Egoyan’s editing, which is frequently dazzling. He structures his film as a kind of multidimensional tapestry in which each part affects the way each other part is seen, and in which the only possible hierarchy is a hierarchy of power. That all the actors’ performances here are restrained, occasionally even wooden, is very much to the point: we are seeing vacant shells, hopeless narcissists who can exist only through the ways others see them. Thus it is that Lisa can define “love” as being about “feeling someone else feeling you,” or that Clara can be driven near suicide when she loses control of her script. When Lance protests the script changes to the producer, on the grounds that they are not “authentic,” the producer replies, “Authentic to what?” In fact, Speaking Parts has no notion of authenticity external to image production. The producer goes on to point out, in one of the few moments in the film’s dialogue that could be characterized as true, that making a movie is a different process from writing a true-life story, and that script changes are needed as a result. But then the producer, whom David Hemblen plays in a wonderfully vile monotone, is relatively ingenuous: he doesn’t claim to be doing anything other than making pictures. The more sympathetic Lisa, by contrast, makes extravagant claims–she says Lance is her lover.
As with so many of the more notable films of recent years, certain film classics spring to mind as possible influences. It is perhaps no accident that TV was seen as a pernicious, even vile influence in early references to it, in 1950s films such as All That Heaven Allows and The Last Hurrah, when television was an economic threat to Hollywood. Recent films, however, in an era in which commercial filmmaking derives much of its income from such video outlets as cable and cassette rentals, partake of much of the video culture, however critical of it they may appear.
