arsinee khanjian

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Atom Egoyan’s Adoration premieres here tonight, and was unveiled to the press earlier today. I saw the film back in Toronto, and liked it, but figured it would polarize audiences in Cannes. After the failures of Ararat and Where the Truth Lies, which both suffered from overwrought ambition–and which even Egoyan’s fans had trouble defending–Adoration is a more intimate film on a much smaller budget. It shows the Toronto auteur returning to his tangled roots, and he seems to relish the freedom. This is classic Egoyan, a playful, perverse intrigue that throws a myriad of ideas into incestuous play and makes of virtue of a preposterous plot. I won’t go into detail here, but it’s about a teenage boy (Devon Bostick) who creates a fictional tale of a terrorist incident involving his deceased parents, which triggers a series of video discussion groups on the Internet and some very bizarre behaviour by the boy’s French/drama teacher, played by the director’s wife, Arsinee Khanjian.