The story of Salome and John the Baptist may be the most twisted tale in the Western canon.  Oscar Wilde’s take on the story, with music by Richard Strauss added, didn’t make it any less twisted.  Nor did Atom Egoyan’s production of the opera for the COC and its several remounts.  How, one might ask, could one ramp the twistedness up a notch?  The answer, and a very successful one, is to have Egoyan make a film based around his production.  And so, Seven Veils, which had its avant-premier, ahead of TIFF, at the Four Seasons Centre last night.

Ambur Braid as Salome (top left), Michael Kupfer-Radecky as Jochanaan (below), and Frédéric Antoun as Narraboth (top right) in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Salome, 2023. Photo: Michael Cooper

I think the best way to describe the film is by way of the relationships entangled in it and avoid spoilers by not writing about how they play out.  The basic premise is the remount of a production of Salome at the COC.  It’s the creation of one Charles, recently deceased.  His widow, who appears now to run the COC, has decided to remount it with Jeannine (played brilliantly by Amanda Seyfried), Charles’ protégée, directing.  The twist here is that the widow is almost certainly aware that Jeannine and Charles had an affair during the original production run.

Jeannine has lots of complicated relationships.  Those who have seen the various iterations of Egoyan’s Salome will remember the video and live shadow dancing segments that hint rather strongly that Salomé has been sexually abused as a young girl.  The suggestion here is that the model for the young girl is the young Jeannine and the abuser is her, by now deceased, father.  Layer onto this that Jeannine’s mother, now in the early stages of dementia, appears to be well aware of what happened and also to be aware that her carer is sleeping with Jeannine’s husband.  The relationship between the husband and his and Jeannine’s daughter, now much the age that Jeannine was when abused, is left open.

And so to the opera house where Clea (Rebecca Liddiard) of the Props department is romantically involved with Rachel (Vinessa Antoine) who is understudying Ambur’s (Braid) Salome.  Ambur, we learn, was also once “an item” with Clea.  Then there’s the relationship between the Jochaanan; Johan (Michael Kupfer-Radecky) and Ambur who have performed the work together in a production in Stuttgart which, it is suggested, crossed well over the line that an intimacy co-ordinator in a North American house would consider acceptable.

But that’s not all.  Jeannine is attracted to Johan’s understudy Luke (Douglas Smith) in a way that seems to owe more to Oscar Wilde than is entirely healthy.  With more pressure from management about how to do her job than most directors would tolerate and tormented by more demons than the average Bosch painting Jeannine starts to lose it.  She’s also losing the confidence of her cast, especially Johan and Herod (Michael Schade) and caps it by intervening in a music rehearsal to the anger of Johannes Debus conducting and the disdain of Ambur who, being Ambur (Braid), has her own firmly held views on “who Salome is”.

From there things unravel with plots aplenty to an opening night that, surprisingly given the chaos of the rehearsal process, is a success.  Bu not before a whole lot of relationships have been tested to and beyond breaking point.

There are, of course, lots of clips from various iterations of the opera at the COC including the most recent one so besides folks I’ve already name checked there’s Karita Mattila, Frédéric Antoun, Carolyn Sproule, Krisztina Szabó and many more.

I really enjoyed the film.  I thought it was a tight, compelling drama; well paced with so many twists and turns that one’s head span but it all made sense in a thoroughly twisted way.  I don’t think one needs to be familiar with the somewhat tortuous production history of Egoyan’s Salome at the COC or with the details and differences between the different iterations but it did add to my enjoyment.  There are actually quite a lot of “opera insider” joke/digs for those who enjoy such things!  There’s a bit of a sense that Egoyan is sending up the business of opera.  (Revenge perhaps for that Slings and Arrows episode years ago?)  In the last analysis it’s just a really well crafted film.

Ok, so much for the film itself.  What was the experience of a film premier like at the Four Seasons Centre which, I don’t think, has ever been used as a cinema before.  There was the usual red carpetty stuff though with Seyfried absent because, one assumes, of the current Hollywood strike the only real buzz was around Egoyan.  But Michael Schade and Ambur Braid were there and we managed to spend some time chatting before things got too crazy.  The theatre itself is a fantastic place to watch a movie.  The video quality is as good as it gets and the sound system combined with the house acoustics is better than any movie theatre in my experience (even the good ones at the TIFF Lightbox).  That makes a huge difference when a fair chunk of the movie is opera.  If I could watch the Met HD broadcasts in this quality I’d probably go more.  There’s definitely a potential role for this kind of event for the sadly underused Four Seasons Centre.

L-R: Me, Ambur, Katja, Michael

All in all a very enjoyable evening.  If you get a chance to see Seven Veils (and I think it’s playing at TIFF) go see it and lets hope there are more movie events at the FSC.