The whole life is a memory game.

What is really happening? And what mere fantasy? In his new film is the Canadian Atom Egoyan the fragility of human memory. 'Simon's Secret "is so quiet as captivating drama, the terror and consolation from the memory recounts.

 

Self-challenging art or convulsions? Atom Egoyan's The cinema has always polarized critics and audiences as either excited or frustrated. Over the years, the films of the Canadian, in 1960 as the son of an Armenian family who was born in Cairo, while some have accused of Prätentiösen eingehandelt. Equally vehement, however, it is Egoyan's approach to defending the representations on the screen repeatedly questioned, and so complex, often fascinating observations about the fleeting nature of identity and memory come.

The same goes for "Simons secrecy" in which Egoyan specifiable themes of his earlier films return to them in the light of a changing media world and new life to light.

At the beginning there is a tragedy, which - as so often in intimate Egoyan's attempt orders - from the painful past into the present stands. The young Simon (Devon Bostick) from Toronto, describes the teaching of French in shaken classmates and teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian), like his father was once a bomb attack on an Israeli passenger plane was planning: He wanted Simons unsuspecting, pregnant mother with high explosives in luggage in the death of chic and only because the perfidious crimes by the security check at the airport was thwarted, she survived and was able to bring Simon to the world.

The shocking lecture not missed its effect and becomes the subject of heated discussions on the Internet. Even Simon himself sits stoically in front of his webcam and participates in the chat room meetings, the ever-widening circles. Its apparent, however, taken a double façade: the story of the father as unscrupulous terrorists Simon has an old newspaper report on loan and with the help of Sabine as part of his biography staged.

And the true fate of his parents Sami (Noam Jenkins) and Rachel (Rachel Blanchard), which many years ago in a car accident, died, moved the closed boys far more than its exterior suggests Enclosed.

VIDEOS ON FILM

Photo: Warner
Video: Warner

'Simon's Secret "
Trailer and Film Clips

Film clip: "Has he even thought of me?"
Film clip: "Are you brought up?"
Film clip: "Everybody's talking about it"

Terrorism, xenophobia, and the digital Familientragödien accelerated dissolution of the collective memory - would be Egoyan's film sträflicherweise on mere motives down would be a pretty sensational descriptor clusters emerged. The silent drama touchiert Although all of these complexes, but entspinnt but an entirely different, peculiar history.

Based on the bizarre fiction, Simon increasingly as a legitimate explanation for the loss never understood the parents' serving the people in his life suffering from repressed hit. This concerns in particular his uncle Tom (Scott Speedman), the nephew alone großzieht itself as a driver of a towing vehicle and will between grief for the sister and anger at the despotic, aufgerieben father is deceased. The masterful head of the family itself exists only as a digital image on Simon's cell phone camera, but the hate of his grandfather against the unwanted son Sami hallen continued steadfastly in the replay.

Remains the enigmatic teacher Sabine from the Middle East, which not only pedagogical interest combines with Simon. Not only transported to the biographical bluff their student, she also calls out the taciturn Tom: disguised as a traditional Muslim burka along is she suddenly in front Toms, and forces him to the supposedly menacing stranger to react. Why Sabine, played by Egoyan's wife and actress Arsinée Khanjian tribe, in this masquerade in the lives of others einklinkt, however, is another mystery.

SIMONS SECRECY (CANADA 2008)

Director: Atom Egoyan
Screenplay: Atom Egoyan
Cast: Arsinée Khanjian, Devon Bostick, Scott Speedman, Rachel Blanchard, Kenneth Welsh
Producer: Atom Egoyan, Simone Urdl, Jennifer Weiss
Distributor: X-Verleih
Running time: 100 minutes
Start: 21 May 2009

Official Website

So it remains to conclude an elaborate memory cards hidden life, the most rigorous yet sensitive structuralist of the Canadian cinemas here is spreading. The hypnotic puzzle differing perceptions and truths of "Family Viewing" (1987) on "The Adjuster" (1991) and "Exotica" (1994) to "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997) a quality of Egoyan's films have remained impressive.

Although reached "Simons secret" do not have all the time intensity of the narrative and aesthetic result of the precursors, but in view of Egoyan's younger, oddly meandering cinema stories like "Where The Truth Lies", he has a brilliant reflection of the young filmmaker at heart strengths.

The last, for Egoyan comforting surprise twist in this family conflict between individual memory and collective memory to prejudge, of course, forbids this. Instead, as an indication only of the original unevenly more appropriate title "Adoration" mentioned. Indeed, last but not least is the difference between worship, which is also always Transfiguration and distortion in itself, and love. And their secret, it needs in a seemingly only medially ascertainable world more than ever, the immediacy of the heart.