Those familiar with Atom Egoyan's work will already be acquainted with
the motifs of alienation and displacement in Felicia's Journey, which stars Bob Hoskins as a strange and lonely bachelor and Elaine Cassidy as the naive
and impressionable Felicia.
Adapted by the director from the William Trevor novel, Felicia's Journey
is essentially a study of these two characters: Hilditch, a mild-mannered
psychopath stuck in a time warp, and the Irish teenager who is his prey.
In her first major role, Elaine Cassidy confidently carries the film with a
beautifully understated performance, while Bob Hoskins also exercises
quiet restraint in his role as the catering manager obsessed with 50s matinee
idol Malcolm Vaughan. The title may be Felicia's, but both these characters
undergo journeys which emerge through layers of narrative unfolding out
from and back into each other in trademark Egoyan style.
But Egoyan's obsession with storytelling technique means that the way
Felicia's Journey is told is given more prominence than the actual
journey itself, ultimately serving only to disengage the audience from the
characters. A last-minute dramatic shift from melodrama highlighted with
hilarious comic moments (flashbacks include Hilditch's ritual humiliation
as a child at the hands of his eccentric TV cook mother) to psycho-sexual
thriller also detracts from the characters' fates.
Like all of Egoyan's films Felicia's Journey is impossible to classify,
but it sadly fails to live up to expectations aroused by the complexity and
poignancy of Egoyan's last film, The Sweet Hereafter.
Reviewed by Monika Maurer
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