(Written by Intern, Alecia Wilk)
Seven Veils concocts an intertextual drama out of one woman’s task to remount a theatre’s most successful opera. Some time after his death, Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is selected to reprise her former mentor’s beloved production. The performance continues to gain a darker air as rehearsals progress, and pieces of the past braid into the twisted encore. Flashbacks assault Jeanine in the form of home videos, unveiling her unique connections with the production. As onstage drama blends with reality’s secrets, the strange and intimate inspirations underlying the foundation’s hit show are illuminated. Feeling like a missed opportunity for a plain adaptation, the original material of Seven Veils constantly branches out in less intriguing directions than the Oscar Wilde play inside it.
The arts community is mourning the loss of the previous director, Charles. It is obvious he had an outsized effect on Jeanine, but the specifics of their relationship are kept in the dark. A massive figure within his craft and Jeanine’s life, her rendition is haunted with a burden to do him justice. Adding to her difficulty, Charles’ wife, Beatrice (Lanette Ware), is overseeing the show and dead set on restricting Jeanine’s creative choices. Despite this dynamic being so ripe for resentment, the conflict is never brought face-to-face. Neither are the bulk of the setbacks fueling Jeanine’s desperation for perfection. Tensions remain as intangible as Charles’ ghost, resulting in a supporting ensemble which feels like props and pawns. As Seyfried channels the wild passion of a tortured director, the lack of vitality from the secondary characters grows all the more bothersome.
To the detriment of her growing neuroticism, Seven Veils leaves Jeanine alone in her obsession with the source material. Salome possesses a chilling symbolic significance, yet more time is spent on directionless exposition than building the opera’s presence. Despite being so central to the story, the stage is visually neglected. Magnificent set designs are reduced to second-hand shots as Jeanine watches them from her glare-tainted iPad. Theatrical imagery and the psychology ostensibly infecting the entire concert hall are overlooked while side-plots are packed in arbitrarily. Mental comparisons to The Phantom of the Opera and Tár can hardly be helped. In a seeming attempt to thematically fuse these pictures, a tonal focus on the spirit of the opera house is lost, providing more distraction than resolution.
Host to an abundance of conceptually interesting material, Seven Veils is spread thin by an ambition to cover wide ground with its plot rather than drill into its essential questions. Overlaying a contemporary legacy atop a retelling of Salome, Atom Egoyan takes on the task of bringing several worlds simultaneously to life. Clearly in love with the referential text, it is a wonder why Jeanine’s narrative took so many detours from getting lost in the surrealism of the art world and its capacity to imitate life.
Get a sense of what secrets lurk behind the curtain call when Seven Veils hits theatres on Friday, March 7.
