"I've been living with it for a very long time," Atom Egoyan reflects. "This character [Jeanine] has been a really extraordinary way for me to deal with certain issues that have been a part of my life for a very long time."
Jeanine, played by Amanda Seyfried, sits at the focal point of Egoyan's latest film, Seven Veils, as a young director mounting Richard Strauss's Salome. Egoyan wrote the film encouraged by his own remounting of the opera in 2023, with a particular interest to the piece's themes concerning a woman's trauma and her agency over it, and how they translate to contemporary society.
In Seven Veils, Jeanine steps into the director's chair under the haze of the late Charles, a famed director whom Jeanine once apprenticed under for his rendition of Salome some years prior, and also whom Jeanine was engaged in an affair with at the time of his death. We eventually learn that Charles incorporated elements of Jeanine's childhood abuse at the hand of her father into his version of the biblical opera, and Jeanine now seeks to reclaim her story through Salome's, who faces unwanted advances from her stepfather.
The following article contains potentially triggering material relating to sexual assault and violence. If you believe you have experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct and are looking for support, consult the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime to find resources in your area.
It's this shared theme of incest that Egoyan has carried with him from Seven Veils to Salome. As a teenager growing up in Toronto, Egoyan learned that his first girlfriend was being abused by her father, "a very well-known artist in the city."
Speaking with Egoyan ahead of Seven Veils' March 7 theatrical release, he shares, "They had, at one level, a very strong relationship, because he was her muse. She was the subject of many of his paintings, but there was something that was very disturbing about the way he was fetishizing her."
It'd be easy to dismiss Egoyan's exploration of a woman's trauma insofar as it has affected him to be on the wrong side of the equation; however, during our conversation it becomes clear that he never adopts her trauma to be his own. In considering his filmography as a whole, particularly the years in which Egoyan wrote and directed 1994's Exotica and 1997's The Sweet Hereafter (and first mounted Salome for the Canadian Opera Company in between those films), he has been trying to understand the incomprehensible.
"What I did in those two films, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, was quite discrete. In Sweet Hereafter, it was very much about trying to understand how someone who had been the victim of abuse might understand it as it was happening — before she understands the violence that was done against her," Egoyan recalls, referring to Nicole, Sarah Polley's character in the film, a 15-year-old aspiring musician who is being sexually abused by her father.
"Exotica... We won't get into that," he says, swiftly moving on from the erotic thriller that concerns itself with a man scarred by the kidnapping and murder of his daughter, finding comfort in frequenting a strip club where he receives private dances from a young woman dressed in a schoolgirl uniform.
Egoyan took on these two films and Salome in succession during the '90s, a time where sex and sexual abuse were often treated rather indelicately, to say the least, especially in comparison to today.
"We didn't really have the language [to deal with these issues]. Certainly, as I was growing up, there was absolutely no language," he notes. "As I was observing it happening in my teens, there was no way to contextualize it."
In writing Seven Veils, Egoyan, armed with a quarter-century of culture shifts since the release of The Sweet Hereafter, used his interpretation of the story of Salome as another way into his ongoing attempt to comprehend what his first love endured and how she processed the abuse during and thereafter.
Unlike Nicole in The Sweet Hereafter, from the outset of Seven Veils, Jeanine understands the trauma caused by her father, and beyond this, she sees her relationship with Charles clearly, including how he appropriated her pain and vulnerability for his art. What bridges these two films is Egoyan's reconciliation of the events across three decades — as if we're seeing Egoyan's rough work in trying to solve an impossible math problem.
Salome culminates in the "Dance of the Seven Veils," wherein the titular stepdaughter of King Herod agrees to perform a slow strip tease, relinquishing her seven veils until she lays bare at his feet. In this moment, Salome, taking advantage of King Herod's attraction to her, which she has consistently rebuffed to this point, takes ownership over her body and sexuality, using it to gain a favour from the king.
In Strauss's 1905 opera and Oscar Wilde's 1891 eponymous play, from which Strauss derived his work, Salome's mother objects to her daughter performing for Herod, pleading with her not to dance. Gustave Flaubert's 1877 short story "Hérodias," which heavily influenced Wilde, sees Salome's mother using her daughter's beauty and sensuality so that Salome may ask the king for a favour at her mother's instruction. The 1844 novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans incorporates a femme fatale-like description of Gustave Moreau's painting Salome Dancing Before Herod.
Egoyan acknowledges the interpretations by these men — or as he plainly groups them, "A whole mess of 19th century male writers" — in Seven Veils by throwing every interpretation into the film, including his own by way of the unseen Charles character whose presence heavily looms. A director known for tessellating seemingly disparate story elements, Egoyan takes a smorgasbord approach in Seven Veils, almost in a similar vein to a Magic Eye illusion.
"It's as though I needed to understand all the different generations of how this circumstance has been addressed through this character, but also through this work of art," Egoyan explains. "I wanted to hand it back to this missing young woman. It's complicated, but I wanted to understand how this had shifted generationally."
The film contains an organized messiness that's echoed in Jeanine — a woman simultaneously assured and perturbed — and aligns with Huysmans's description of Salome as "... the symbolic deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, of accursed Beauty... ." Within this dishevelled chaos, though, prevails an admission that perhaps some ugliness in the world can't truly be processed, but we can confront the ways in which it influences us as individuals.
"I think it's embedded in the film, this idea of not only how trauma transmits generationally, but also how our understanding of what it means actually impacts the way we produce art, the way we think of ourselves, the way we address issues within us as well," Egoyan says.
"I wanted to address it in all its complexity."