Twentysomething naïf Patrick Tierney drifts through his WASP household until video therapy one day gives
him a glimpse of an Armenian clan in emotional tatters for having given their only son up for adoption. Already a
believer in therapeutic role-playing, he takes off to Toronto to present himself at the family's doorsteps as the
long-lost boy, cozing up to the parents (Berge and Sirvart Fazlian) and hitting it off with rebellious "sister" Arsinée
Khanjian. Released in the same year as Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, Atom Egoyan's remarkably lucid
first feature is every bit as notable a debut in the landscape of independent filmmaking. Though his lustrous style's
embryonic at best (visually, the movie is very much indieland circa 1998), Egoyan's complexity of themes (video,
families, unformed identities, the "absent gaze") is already on display. The surface surety of the film's arc, from
white-bread sterility to warm, ethnic "Otherness," is constantly fractured (and, as result, expanded) by the director's
questioning use of identity, narration and stereotype -- the mystique of video technology (to be explored further in
Family Viewing) is here not nearly as destructive as the characters' cultural deception, pointed toward one other as
much as toward themselves. Arguably the most easily accessed (and misread) of Egoyan's films, though no less
rigorous in its ironies for that. Also with Margaret Loveys.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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