Atom Egoyan’s “Seven Veils,” which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week is built around this year’s Canadian Opera Company production of Richard Strauss’s “Salome,” which Egoyan also directed.
The film repurposes the stage production’s performers, props and sets, but this is far from one of those Fathom Events concert films. It continues Egoyan’s exploration of familiar themes such as semiotics, authorship, trauma, video vs. memory, and the personal vs. the communal.
Egoyan doesn’t play the director here. Rather, Amanda Seyfried stars as theater director Jeanine, who has spent an extended time away from opera and is tasked to remount the COC production of “Salome” and recreate the vision of her mentor, Charles, who died last year.