Living In a TV

[setsuled]

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A young man's moral crisis is experienced in a dreamlike series of events involving video tape in 1989's Speaking Parts, a Canadian film directed by Atom Egoyan. The film's subtext regarding the simultaneous distance and extraordinary intimacy of video media is fascinating and reminded me a bit of Inland Empire or Videodrome.

Lance (Michael McManus) and Lisa (Arsinee Khanjian) are housekeepers at an expensive hotel. One day, Lance finds a movie script in a hotel room and cons his way into getting an audition. Around this time, he stops speaking to Lisa, who was possibly his lover. Lisa claims Lance was her lover but it's not clear if Lisa understands reality in the same way most people do.

Lance has worked as an extra on various movies and Lisa regularly rents them at the local video store so she can watch him in the background of various scenes. Eddy (Tony Nardi), the proprietor of the video store, takes an interest in Lisa. They get to talking about Eddy's sideline as an event photographer and occasional interviewer and immediately Lisa wants to conduct interviews for Eddy. This is a job Lisa is woefully unqualified for. In her first attempt, she interviews a bubbly, happy young bride at a wedding. Lisa is a foreigner with a thick accent and unshaven eyebrows. She's clearly never spent time in Hollywood circles or even among the popular girls at school. She's an introvert and all of her questions sound demanding and uncomfortably fervent. She's the food lover who thinks her love can make her a good chef. But getting people to talk and open up is a skill one has to develop and the poor young bride starts to panic and cry in response to Lisa's existential questions, particularly a strange one about how you "feel your love" in your partner.

So from this, it's not entirely clear if Lisa and Lance were ever together or if it was all in Lisa's imagination. We never see Lance actually speaking to her as a lover.

Meanwhile, Lance gets to know Clara (Gabrielle Rose), the woman who wrote the script he found. It turns out the script is a true story about Clara's brother who donated a lung to her. However, the director wants to fundamentally alter the script so Clara implores Lance to demand changes once he gets the role.

Lance and Clara sleep together but after that they communicate almost entirely through video conference. At one point, they masturbate for each other, Lance watching her on the little CRT television. The director of the film Clara wrote the screenplay for only speaks to her through the same method, signifying the communications barrier he puts between them.

It's hard to imagine what it was like in 1989 now that we live in this world where video communication is common and porn is ubiquitous. But the movie doesn't feel irrelevant. If anything, it makes me wonder at some fundamental aspect of human perception that may have been lost or altered in the years since.

Meanwhile, Lisa begins to experience what may be full blown hallucinations involving video that somehow may make a real link between her and Lance. The line between subjective and objective becomes increasingly difficult to perceive. Which is a point well taken.

Speaking Parts is available on The Criterion Channel.