Strip clubs are designed to seduce their clientele, to
create spaces in which absent pleasures are vicariously provided. They fulfill
a certain desire people have, but they really only serve to fill people’s wants
not their needs. They imitate people’s desires but they’re a poor substitute
for the real thing. Exotica focuses on the clients and workers at the titular
strip club but it’s not really about a strip club. That’s merely a tantalizing
hook, with the apparent promise of nudity, which allows writer-director Atom Egoyan to explore
the void a place like a strip club, and the desires it fabricates, tries to
fill. There’s certainly some sexy business, and Egoyan shows off some
stripteases but he places them in the context of what they mean to different
characters and what the emotional exchange being made is as much as the
monetary one. But the true visual pleasure of Exotica is its sustained mood.
Egoyan emphasizes how seedy and desperate this business is and the people who
are part of this despairing place, but he also luxuriates in the alluring
surfaces of it, the sexiness and sensuousness that hides such deep grief and
melancholy underneath. The film unravels like a confounding mystery, but so much of the pleasure of the film, beyond Paul Sarossy's hauntingly sublime camerawork, is its enticing slow-burn; gradually piecing together what Egoyan intends so much of this to be for.
Grade: A-
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