• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

EXTRAEXTRA ORDINARY ORDINARY byby Campbell Campbell Dalglish, Dalglish,GUEST [email protected] [email protected] OF HONOUR by Campbell Dalglish, [email protected] Guest of Honour is a psychological puzzle about how love can derange a heart and challenge the mind to remember exactly what happened. The film’s unreliable narrator, Jim played by the magnificent David Thewlis (Avatar and Naked) is the father and husband, and a meticulous health inspector of restaurants after abandoning one of his own. Married to the “most beautiful woman in the world,” Roseangel (Tennille Read), their marriage begins to disintegrate under her anxiety attacks and depression. Director/Writer Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) has left a few pieces of the puzzle on the side of this film to make us think about what’s missing that might help its characters overcome grief, like the exact cause of death for three love-stricken victims, four if we include a fluffy white rabbit named Benjamin. (Think Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit and the Alice in Wonderland syndrome). The one death for which we do know the cause, is the one no one else knows about except Jim’s daughter, Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira). Suffering unbearable guilt she frames herself in a prank scandal that never happened with a group of her music students. Why did she allow herself to be sentenced for something she did not do? Jim wants to know. He must confront his daughter’s music student, Walter (Gage Munroe) to find out. What Jim discovers only further baffles him and us, as he makes a surprising self-deprecating drunken speech as a guest of honor in a restaurant where a family celebrates the success of their own daughter who has just earned her degree as a doctor. Pieces of Jim’s puzzle come together in an alternate reality amidst another family, and he is ushered out as the unhealthy psychotic in a restaurant he was about to shut down. Not until Father Greg (Luke Wilson) meets with the confused Veronica over a discussion of a eulogy for her father, where the film begins, does the truth begin to spill out. Or is it the truth? The “other woman,”Alicia (Sochi Fried) who has died, and who Veronica believed to be her father’s lover and the cause of her mother’s break down, confessed to Father Greg that Roseangel, suffering anxiety attacks, encouraged Alicia to have a love affair with her husband for the sake of her son and Veronica. When her son commits suicide over his love for Veronica, Veronica’s guilt becomes unbearable and her perception of her father’s love affair with her boyfriends’ mother too puzzling for her. While this film can be dismissed as poorly written and directed, throwing its only salvation onto the superb acting of its unreliable narrator played by David Thewlis, I must stand out against these critics and state that this film, if you are up to the challenge, will suck you into its romantic obsessions with its strange music played on wine glasses half full, or are they half empty, and make you wonder about when you first experienced self-destructive love at too young an age. While the complexity of this film may baffle its audience, the cinematography by Paul Sarossy will seduce you into these dangerous intimacies and the music score by Michael Danna will tie it together when you most need it. Enjoy the challenge of a very complex obsession, beautifully written by one of our most intriguing film auteurs Atom Egoyan and performed with subtle depth by David Thewlis..

Load more

  1

Copy Link