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The second Canadian director we'll be covering in our ongoing series, Atom Egoyan, seems as though he couldn't be further from the other Canadian director we've covered, David Cronenberg, but in actuality, the two share a lot of similarities. BornAtom Yeghoyan in Cairo in 1960 to Armenian-Egyptian parents, the future director moved with his family to British Columbia when he was only two, but his unique perspective as an immigrant has fueled his worldview. His films often deal with that pressing issue that William Faulkner so eloquently put into words in his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun,"The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

A great many of his films, and especially the characters in these films, are attempting to outrun past transgressions, seeking to bury them under layers of denial, drug and alcohol abuse, or even by externalizing them so they don't have to bear the weight of their guilt. From Bruce Greenwood and Ian Holm's grieving fathers in, respectively, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, to Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth's sexually transgressive comedy duo in Where the Truth Lies, Egoyan's characters often face a reckoning in the present directly related to an event in their past.

He began his career in the early 80s, winning critical acclaim from the very beginning of his career, and though he's never quite become what one might call a "mainstream" director, he is certainly highly esteemed among students and scholars of film. In Robert K. Elder's book The Film That Changed My Life, Egoyan credits Ingmar Bergman's Persona as the film that inspired him to become a filmmaker, forever changing the course of his life...

"It gave me an incredible respect for the medium and its possibilities. To me, Persona marries a pure form and a very profound vision with absolute conviction. It's very inspiring. I felt that it was able to open a door that wasn't there before."

Sex, whether normal or abnormal, is almost always a key element of his films as well. He tends to lean into uncomfortable sexual situations, typically because it can cause the most visceral of reactions from his audience. Viewers can typically handle all manner of violent acts on film, but when sex takes that turn into the realm of uncomfortable, it has a way of bringing the audience to that same place of agony. It's an effective trick, one he hasn't worn out so much as he has perfected it,never allowing the audience to come to terms with many of the things he puts in his work.

Speaking Parts (1989)

Following his 1984 autobiographical debut film, Next of Kin, Egoyan began exploring more sexually adventurous territory with his next two films, 1987's Family Viewing and this 1989 film which blurs the lines between cinema and reality to brilliant effect. Michael McManus stars as Lance, a man who wears a lot of hats, namely as a day player on movie sets. His big dream is to make it as a real actor in the movies, landing those coveted roles the film's title hints at, but in the meantime, he works as a hotel custodian and gigolo.

While cleaning a room in the hotel one day, he discovers a script that really connects with him, so he decides to leave his acting resume on the table with the script. The room's occupant is a struggling screenwriter named Clara (Gabrielle Rose) who has just sold this script, based on her relationship with her brother, to a television studio and thinks that Lance might be the perfect man for the role. The two begin a torrid affair that boils over into the film they're making, with the film's director altering bits of the script daily to almost mirror the real relationship between Lance and Clara.

It's the first of many tangled webs Egoyan has woven, with his trademark eye toward characters attempting to escape their pastbut instead running headlong into their destiny. The film's only nudity comes 41 minutes in when Gabrielle Rose pleasures herself while having a video conference with McManus, who is also pleasuring himself. We get some nice looks at her breasts as she fondles them while climaxing...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

The Adjuster (1991)

Egoyan began a long working relationship with fellow Canuck Elias Koteas with his next film, the even more sexually bizarre film The Adjuster. Koteas and another longtime Egoyan collaborator—and the director's real life wife—Arsinée Khanjian play married couple Noah and Hera, who each have a pretty strange vocation. Khanjian's job finds her watching pornographic films for theBoard of Censors, while Koteas works as an insurance adjuster with a rather unorthodox method for helping people recover—hint, it involves sleeping with them.

A rather dubious filmmaker, played by late, great character actor Maury Chaykin, soon convinces the couple that they should be putting their sexually adventurous habits on film, something which doesn't appeal to Hera. Noah, on the other hand, seems intrigued by the offer and eventually finds a willing participant, Hera's sister Arianne (Jennifer Dale), who looks enough like his wife to convince the filmmaker to progress with the project.

This film in particular is where one can really see the comparisons between Egoyan and Cronenberg, with the latter also casting Koteas in his equally sexually explicit film Crash. Remember folks, Canadians may seem mild mannered on the surface, but if these two men have taught us anything, it's that Canadians are kinky as shit. When Noah and Arianne finally get it on for the filmmaker's camera, we get some nice looks at Jennifer Dale's breasts while she and her brother-in-law get busy...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

Exotica (1994)

**Portions of the following text are excerpted from our Staff Picks: Hyperlink Cinema article...

A good number of Hyperlink films are set in and around a strip club, but none before of sinceExoticahad a marketing campaign and title so geared to make you think the whole movie was going to take in a strip club.Woe to the man who sees the film under such pretenses. Yes, there's a substantial portion of the first and third act that take place in a strip club, but there's an hour in between of various adults coming to terms with tragedy and numbing the painin various unhealthy ways. Likea great many of Egoyan's films, Exoticadeals in characters treating their pain and past tragedy through sex, in all its various forms.

A bearded Bruce Greenwood plays a mild-mannered tax auditor who deals with his past personal tragedy by channeling his obsession into exotic dancer Christina (Mia Kirshner), who toils away at the titular club under the close eye of the always dubious Elias Koteas. Anyone lured in by the film's opening and marketing campaign will discover that the film's interests lie outside the doors of the club, which will be a disappointment should you hope to only enjoy the film for its nudity. I'll help by getting that out of the way for you right now, so you can see the film—good luck finding it—and appreciate its twisty Hyperlink narrative...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

Egoyan's first brush with the big time came with this quietly unsettling 1997 drama, based on Russell Banks' novel of the same name, which earned him his first two Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. After a school bus crash kills 14 children in rural British Columbia, big city lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) comes to town to convince the grieving parents to file a class action lawsuit against the town and the bus company.

As with many small towns, everyone is involved in everyone else's business, so it isn't long before people in town take up sides. Some want justice while others think this is just a way for a big city lawyer like Stephens to line his own pockets by ruining more lives. Much of Stephens' case hinges on the testimony of a 15-year old paralyzed girl named Nicole (Sarah Polley), who will prove instrumental in sealing the case. Whether or not she ever gets to testify, and what she'll say if she does, is another matter entirely.

One of theaggrieved parentswho doesn't cotton to Stephens' big city talk is Billy Ansel (Bruce Greenwood), who is involved in an affair with Risa Walker (Alberta Watson), with the two shacking up in the same motel where Stephens is staying. We get some brief full frontal from the late Alberta Watson shortly before Stephens spies Billy coming out of the room...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

Ararat (2002)

Following another critically acclaimed but skinless flick in 1999's Felicia's Journey, Egoyan next dove into a subject that hit close to his heritage, the 1915 Armenian Genocide. This hot-button topic has had its fair share of film adaptations attempting to make sense of the events as they occurred, but Egoyan takes a different path. Egoyan's wife Arsinée Khanjianstars as Ani, an Armenian woman living in Toronto with her adult son Raffi (David Alpay) and her step-daughter Celia (Marie-Josée Croze), whose father died under rather mysterious circumstances.

Ani, an art historian and lecturer, is soon hired by an ambitious Armenian filmmaker (Charles Aznavour) to serve as a historical consultant on his upcoming film about the Armenian Genocide. Raffi also gets a job working on the film, but finds himself at odds with the lead actor in the film, who claims that the Ottomans were justified in their actions during the Genocide. It isn't long before Raffi is sent to Turkey to do some location shooting, but his return brings him to the attention of an aging customs agent (Christopher Plummer), who thinks the young man is involved in drug smuggling.

As one might expect from any film dealing with so heady a subject as the Armenian Genocide, the film is more dialogue heavy than anything else, with characters endlessly debating one another in an attempt to gain a moral high ground. In that regard, it plays a bit better than something like Terry George's The Promise, which puts you in the midst of the actual genocide, as that aesthetic distance allows the audience to better consider all possible sides of the story.

In keeping with Egoyan's often uncomfortable use of sexuality, one of the film's subplots involve a sexual relationship between step-siblings Raffi and Celia. Marie-Josée Croze shows some terrific TA while banging her step-brother 24 minutes into the film. Again, you kinda have to divorce it from the context to derive any sort of pleasure from the scene...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

Where the Truth Lies (2005)

In a filmography rife with dark films exploring even darker themes, it's hard to argue that he's made a bleaker vision of humanity that this 2005 flick. Based on the novel of the same name by Rupert "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" Holmes, Where the Truth Lies deals with the legendary Martin Lewis-esque comedy team of Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth), whose partnership abruptly ended in the late 50s. The film opens with the two comedians finishing up their latest 39-hour telethon in Miami and flying to a New Jersey hotel owned by notorious gangster Sally Sanmarco (Maury Chaykin). Upon arriving in their suite, they discover the dead body of Miami college student Maureen O'Flaherty (Rachel Blanchard) dead in their bathtub.

Fifteen years later, we're introduced to Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman), a journalist who has been hired to serve as Vince's ghost writer for his upcoming autobiography. Unbeknownst to him, Karen has pledged to Maureen's mother that she will get to the bottom of the now-cold case of her daughter's murder, though Collins eventually ends up blackmailing her into not speaking with him about the incident. His blackmail scenario involves him getting Karen drunk and then inviting an escort calling herself Alice (Kristin Adams) to come over for a threesome, photographing enough pictures of the encounter to hopefully buy Karen's silence...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

Meanwhile, Lanny has been anonymously sending Karen pages from his own upcoming autobiography, in which he goes into much more explicit detail on the events that led to him and Vince parting ways. We're reintroduced to Lanny and his "manager" Denise (Rebecca Davis), who bares some phenomenal full frontal in a hotel room...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

Of course, all roads lead back to that fateful night all those years ago when poor Maureen ended up dead. When we flashback to that rendezvous, it starts with Rachel Blanchard having sex withLanny on the couch, before Vince comes in to turn this party into a threesome. That ends rather abruptly when the closeted bisexual Vince attempts to penetrate Lanny, causing Lanny to fly into a fit of rage...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

As to the particulars of the murder, I'm going to leave that up to you to discover for yourself, as this film is easily one of Egoyan's best and most essential efforts as a filmmaker. Needless to say, the film's title is firmly cemented in the film's final minutes as the truth eventually comes outand Karen must decide what to do with that information.

The film was controversial from the get-go, with its explicit and almost omnipresent sexuality earning it the restrictive NC-17 rating. Distributor THINKFilm eventually decided to release the film Unrated, though even that didn't help the film to play in more than a couple hundred theaters. When it was released on DVD, they produced an R-rated cut, whichrather unfortunately became the better known version of the film due to its wider availability. The Unrated Cut also got a DVD release, but most retailers and rental outlets opted to carry the R-rated version, leaving Egoyan's original vision to languish in relative obscurity. Thankfully the age of streaming has given the Unrated cut the boost it deserves and I recommend you seek it out.

Chloe (2010)

Our discussion of Egoyan's films ends with probably his second-most skin-filled flick with this 2010 effort starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried as the title character. Moore plays gynecologist Catherine, who suspects her college professor husband David (Neeson) of having an affair with one of his students. Determined to confirm her suspicions for herself, Catherine hires an attractive call girl named Chloe (Seyfried) to seduce her husband and report back with all the gory details. WhenChloe and David'sfirst rendezvous only ends in a kiss, Catherine becomes enraged and demands that Chloe meet with him again.

Catherine and Chloe meet several more times, with Catherine demanding to know all of the details of her future encounters with David. Chloe soon intuits that Catherine is actually getting turned on by the thought of her husband sleeping with her and leans in to kiss Catherine. Though Catherine overreacts, it isn't long before the two of them are shacking up in a hotel room, with Seyfried and Moore going nude for one of the steamiest cougar/kitten lesbian scenes of the last decade...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's FilmsA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Atom Egoyan's Films

Suspicion grows between Catherine and David, who is now accusing his own wife of being unfaithful to him. Catherine then sets up a meeting with Chloe at one of David's favorite coffee shops, but David has clearly never laid eyes on Chloe before then, leading Catherine to realize that she was fabricating her stories. After finally owning up to her own infidelity with Chloe, she and David eventually reconcile, which leads Chloe herself to become vindictive as she realizes she has feelings for Catherine.

She goes to their home when they are out of the house one evening, finding their adult son Michael (Max Thieriot) home and she seduces him in hopes of getting back at Catherine. This sex scene isn't talked about as much as the lesbian hookup, for obvious reasons, but it is one of Seyfried's best nude scenes in a career filled with them...

Although I've taken you up to the final minutes of the film, I'd rather not spoil the final twist as it still packs a wallop and is worth discovering by watching the film and not reading about it here. Needless to say, the film doesn't have a happy ending, something which has more or less become Egoyan's stock in trade.

Egoyan has since made an additional four feature films, including last year's Guest of Honour, though none of them have really connected with international audiences in the same way as his previous work. He seems to be far from done with filmmaking, however, so we can only hope that he still has the power to titillate, shock, and revolt us all again in the future. Fingers crossed that combination hits again sooner rather than later.

Atom Egoyan Films with Nudity Not Currently On Our Site

Family Viewing (1987)

Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series

John Boorman |John Schlesinger|James Ivory|Alan Parker|Walter Hill|Tony Scott|Louis Malle|Mike Nichols|Allison Anders|Jonathan Demme|William Friedkin|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part One|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Two|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Three|Federico Fellini|Philip Kaufman|Miloš Forman|Pedro Almodóvar: Part One|Pedro Almodóvar: Part Two|Blake Edwards|Catherine Breillat: Part One|Catherine Breillat: Part Two|Spike Lee|John Landis|David Cronenberg: Part One|David Cronenberg: Part Two|Ingmar Bergman|François Truffaut|Bernardo Bertolucci|Steven Soderbergh|Kathryn Bigelow|Oliver Stone|Roman Polanski|Nicolas Roeg|David Fincher|Francis Ford Coppola|Pier Paolo Pasolini|Ken Russell: Part One|Ken Russell: Part Two|Robert Altman:Part I|Robert Altman:Part II|Adrian Lyne|Martin Scorsese|Jane Campion|Park Chan-wook|Bob Fosse|Dario Argento|Wes Craven|Tobe Hooper|Todd Haynes|Danny Boyle|Stanley Kubrick|Paul Thomas Anderson|David Lynch|Brian De Palma|Paul Schrader|Paul Verhoeven

**Non-nude images courtesy of IMDb