November 18–25, 1999

movie shorts

Felicia’s Journey

recommended

Atom Egoyan’s haunting, extraordinary film is a change of pace from his recent work (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) in its incisive focus on two characters, each caught in a web of self-deception and nostalgia for what never was. Hilditch (Bob Hoskins) is a catering manager in a small English industrial town. His fierce attention to detail is fueled by an obsession with his dead mother (Arsinée Khanjian), whom he watches every night on videotapes of her ’50s cooking show (where she seems an eerie precursor of Martha Stewart, the consummate domestic being). Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) arrives from Ireland, rejected by her Catholic father (Gerard McSorley) and in search of her unborn child’s father (Peter McDonald), a British soldier who has obviously abandoned her. Felicia and Hilditch’s tentative friendship develops as you watch their pasts unfold in precise and increasingly disturbing flashbacks, accompanied by Mychael Danna’s broodingly militaristic score. As in Egoyan’s previous films, you put the pieces together, soon realizing that Hilditch is a serial killer of young women, lost, childlike, and alone, much like Felicia. The tension becomes almost unbearable as both characters realize their limits and their surprising potentials (the finale seems odd, but makes sense in the film’s intricate investigation of parent-child impasses). Hoskins and Cassidy are both quietly superb.

(See Cindy Fuchs’ interview with Atom Egoyan)

—Cindy Fuchs