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Where the Truth lies
Directed by Atom Egoyan
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman, Rachel Blanchard
Script: Atom Egoyan
Running Time: 1:47min
Country: Canada
Year: 2005
Official Site: Where the Truth lies
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An adaptation of the best-selling mystery novel by Rupert Holmes, Where the Truth Lies reveals the underside of Hollywood's industry of dreams. With Egoyan, sunlight envelops the worst turpitudes it its deceptive halo. The shady zone, usually reserved for the behind-the-scenes, is the subject of the search here. The approach is hardly astonishing for a moral filmmaker, whose filmography affirms his penchant for secrecy, pretenses and mourning.
Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon—both exceptional here—play a famous comic TV duo from the Fifties, which becomes notorious for its use of TV as new medium and, more particularly for their participation to a memorable telethon. Luxury, drugs, money and easy conquests are part of the daily lives of this ambivalent couple, true show men for whom language is a true force, or rather, a way of resistance in the policed society of the Fifties. But a woman's corpse found in their hotel suite puts an end to their dazzling career. Twenty years later, an ambitious journalist (Alison Lohman) tries to uncover the mystery. She approaches each of the two men, confronting them with their guilt. A true Socratic work, Where the Truth Lies multiplies the back and forth between past and present. The memory of the night when everything turned upside down returns like a heady leitmotiv, a result enriched by new elements.
Egoyan likes to film broken paths (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter), fallen angels, loss. Where the Truth Lies is a new story of a fall. Nevertheless, the film surprises with its very Hollywood setting: a work of careful reconstruction, rhythm and narration. Apart from the usual reasons, one finds very little of Atom Egoyan's style which dares to blatantly film sexuality. This obliteration of the author to the advantage of the story makes for a skilled but somewhat impersonal film.
The success of Where the Truth Lies lies above all in this shady couple, with Kevin Bacon assuming the female role. But there is an impassable limit that cannot break through these two- however-complementary men. This line is perhaps the difference between the Fifties and the Seventies, cinema and television, life and death.
Sandrine Marques
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
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