(Credits: Far Out / TIFF)

Talented director Atom Egoyan’s latest feature is a compelling character study centred on the rehearsal process in preparation for a stage performance of the Richard Strauss opera Salome. While speaking at a recent film festival screening, Egoyan discussed the production, acknowledging that most of his films are “structured like puzzles” – and Seven Veils is no exception. It is not a puzzle in the sense of a murder mystery or suspense story, but one that explains characters’ actions by gradually revealing their background, personal struggles, and conscious or unconscious motivations. In this case, the focus is on the opera director, Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried), whose past trauma and the longstanding emotional aftermath are slowly revealed in parallel to the development of the opera.

The choice of this particular opera as the film’s unifying force was not an accident. Egoyan directed a stage production of Salome by the Canadian Opera Company during the same period he directed the film, recycling the singers as performers in the film version. The opera house in Toronto is also the set for most of the movie. The script was partly inspired by Salome’s problematic storyline. As Egoyan explained during a post-screening Q&A, the story of Salome, told in the New Testament, was a common theme for 19th-century writers and artists, culminating in Oscar Wilde’s high-flown play and the 1905 Richard Strauss opera drawn from it.

Diverging wildly from the brief scriptural account, these versions were violent, salacious, and arguably misogynistic. Noting that there could be “issues” in presenting Salome in the present day, Egoyan wrote a script that involved examining and reinterpreting the story, telling a modern version by facing and dealing with the questionable aspects of the opera. In addition, since all earlier versions of Salome were written from a male perspective, Egoyan felt that a female point of view should be central.

The female protagonist, Jeanine, is a gifted director, but one who not only suffers the effects of past trauma but is dealing with a recent and distressing separation from her husband. The character is introduced to us in the opening scenes as she walks through the opera house, examining unfinished, highly experimental stage sets and making plans for the upcoming production. Difficult aspects of the Salome story are acknowledged by a half-joking assessment of the plot as “a pretty weird love story” and describing the climactic beheading as “the first recorded Biblical sex crime”.

As the operatic tale unfolds through sporadic rehearsed scenes, bits of Jeanine’s life begin to emerge, beginning with references to an absent previous director of Salome named Charles, a brilliant former mentor of Jeanine’s whose impact looms. Her attitude toward Charles is puzzling, seeming to swing from admiration to jealousy at the praise he inspires on set to something darker. There is ongoing tension between Jeanine and the crew, who favour following Charles’ approach over Jeanine’s revisioning, offering insights into the effects of dominance and prestige in the creative process. Slowly, provoked by the opera and the memories it seems to trigger, Jeanine’s repressed pain and troubled past are revealed and ultimately confronted.

Amanda Seyfried, who worked with Egoyan in the tense 2009 drama Chloe, was the director’s first choice for the role of Jeanine; Egoyan noted that he’d hoped to work with Seyfried again since her excellent performance in Chloe. Seyfriend is compelling as the haunted Jeanine, struggling with unsettling memories as she returns to theatre directing after a lengthy absence. The mystery of Jeanine’s difficult past is further untangled in well-devised, faintly creepy scenes in which she meets with family members, and her eyes are opened to some sinister peculiarities she has ignored in the past.

Seyfried gives a vivid but beautifully controlled portrayal of a woman whose buried trauma is forced to the surface, threatening to impact the effectiveness of her work and her peace of mind. Meanwhile, references to power dynamics and their potential for abuse, of many kinds and for many reasons, run through backstage activities, providing hints and possible contexts for the central plot.

The opera itself is not merely a backdrop but a very significant part of the story, as Jeanine’s turmoil is not only provoked by the story of Salome but also begins to influence how she directs the production. Scenes from the opera take up a fair amount of the film, particularly some of the more unsettling scenes, ranging from young Salome’s sexual coercion to the gruesome beheading of John the Baptist. The operatic scenes are remarkably well worth the trouble of having actual opera company performers take the on-stage roles, including Ambur Braid reprising her role as Salome, Karita Matilla as Herodias, and Michael Kupfer-Radecky as a demanding, manipulative lead singer who plays the Prophet John.

It was, in fact, a fair amount of trouble. Assistant director Daniel Murphy commented, following a Salome screening, that the music itself was “amazingly cinematic” but presented some practical difficulties, beginning with the sound mixer’s efforts to make the operatic singing compatible with normal speech in most scenes. In addition, singers would not be available on days they performed or rehearsed for the stage production, as the singing style was too “athletic and exhausting” to allow for multiple sessions in a single day. “Every day had its challenges,” director Egoyan remarked, describing as “harrowing” the difficulty of working around the singers’ schedules, the limited availability of the orchestra providing the instrumental music, the cast members who tested positive for Covid-19, and the daunting challenge of having only nineteen days to complete the film.

Egoyan and a well-chosen cast have overcome these challenges to deliver a suspenseful, fascinating account of a woman’s repressed tribulation, expressing her pain and its ultimate exorcism through an eccentric and flamboyant but ultimately effective metaphor.