In "Family Viewing" Van(Aidan Tierney) and Aline(Arsinee Khanjian) meet at a retirement home while visiting their respective loved ones. Aline works as a phone sex operator which cannot support her mother's care while Van is the only member of his family to visit his grandmother, his mother having no contact with the
rest of the family. Van's father, Stan(David Hemblen), has since remarried a younger woman, Sandra(Gabrielle Rose).(Stan works in electronics and has a tendency to videotape everything.) Aline receives a lucrative offer to meet a client in Montreal for a week and asks Van to look after her mother while she is gone..."Family Viewing" is not as good as the other early Atom Egoyan movies I have been watching recently but it still has its share of worthwhile moments. This movie is also about family and disconnectedness, but there is less of a story than usual. And the videotaping of sex is not that weird, as long as everybody agrees to it and they are all having fun. (And on that note, I am on vacation and will return to these pages on Tuesday, September 26.)
September 14, 2006
