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Cinematical - Adoration, the newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan, is a beautifully evocative film, though some may find its convoluted storyline distracting. In many respects, the film very much evokes one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan’s 1997 Palme d’Or and Oscar nominee*. Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective nature of reality and identity in a technological age. In a world where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person — or even ourselves?
The story centers on a young boy, Simon, (Devon Bostick), who, while completing a school assignment translating a newspaper story about a man who planted a bomb on his pregnant girlfriend, spontaneously re-imagines the story as if the couple were his own parents, and he the unborn child his father plotted to blow up along with his mother and 400 other innocents on a flight to Israel.
Simon’s French teacher, Sabine (Egoyan’s wife, Arsinée Kanjian) who also teaches drama, encourages him to read his story to the class as if he really is the son of the couple in the newspaper story. When he puts his story out on the internet, though, it starts to have an impact he never imagined: His friends, random folks philosophizing about terrorism, and the actual survivors of the botched bombing attempt are all drawn into his story and react to it… [Full Story]
