A sense of menace is created by the sympathetic interest the creepy, precise, fatherly figure takes in this vulnerable girl, wandering in a strange land. Their paths cross by chance then re-cross, not by chance. Meanwhile Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), a pregnant girl in her late teens, leaves a village in the Irish Republic to pursue her boyfriend to England, knowing only that he has gone to work in a factory in Birmingham. His spare time is spent watching old black-and-white videos of an exotic TV cook called Gala (Arsinée Khanjian doing Fanny Craddock with an outrageous French accent), whose work he scrupulously emulates in his rather grand kitchen to the strains of sentimental 1950s ballads like 'My Special Angel' and 'Faith of a Child'. The fastidious middle-aged bachelor Joseph Hilditch (Bob Hoskins) works as the catering manager in a Birmingham factory, drives a 1960s Morris Minor and lives alone in a large suburban house furnished in a faded inter-war style. And it's taken a Canadian director born in Cairo, Atom Egoyan, working from a novel by an Irishman, William Trevor, to do it.įelicia's Journey has a firm sense of place, or rather of places, because the movie has two strands that take a while to become entwined. T here have been television plays and drama series set in Birmingham, but offhand I can't think of any big-screen movie before Felicia's Journey that has been shot in England's second city.
Rather than nothing being quite what it seems, everything seems to fall into place according to earlier Egoyan films, which suggests that you’re likelier to enjoy this one if you haven’t seen the others. He’s the lonely son of a glamorous French woman (Arsinee Khanjian) who hosted a TV cooking show in the 50s. The plot centers on a penniless and pregnant Irish girl (Elaine Cassidy), in search of her departed boyfriend, who’s taken in by a catering manager (Bob Hoskins) at a factory in Birmingham, England. An adaptation of William Trevor’s novel of the same title, the film replays such thematic staples of Egoyan as familial dysfunction, dark secrets, and video, but the overall blend seems both inadequately developed and warmed-over, even though Egoyan’s overall command of filmmaking remains as assured as ever. Atom Egoyan’s first major disappointment as writer-director, this isn’t so much uncharacteristic as archetypal, which may be part of the problem.
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