Other Titles • Felicia's Journey • Le Voyage de Félicia (1999)
Synopses for Felicia's Journey (1999)
1.
Stumbling through the beautifully rendered industrial Midlands, England, in clunky platform shoes, hair fashioned in a childlike ponytail, the young Irish Felicia (Cassidy) plows along in search of the boyfriend who impregnated her and promised to write. Along the way she meets the kindly, middle-aged Joseph Hilditch who offers to help her find her love. However, all is not as it seems--the mild-mannered catering manager of a large factory is, in fact, unhinged. As the story unfolds we follow his attempts to befriend and earn the trust of the guileless Felicia--who, as a product of Irish old world superstition and family dysfunction (a world that Egoyan reveals in sparing yet memorably atmospheric glimpses) is utterly clueless as to his motives. Hilditch, played with a creepy undercurrent intensity by Hoskins, also manages to be truly sympathetic at the same time. A bachelor, he obsessively and ritualistically prepares torturously detailed meals for himself--instructed via videotapes of an old TV cooking program hosted by his late, overbearing French mother, who had forced her unattractive, socially graceless and unwilling young son to be her guinea pig. The legacy of his mother's effect on him is revealed in Hilditch's own precise, neurotic focus on cooking; and in a quiet sub-hobby--meeting and befriending young women who eventually disappear from his life. The film chronicles his latest "relationship" with the singular Felicia.
2.
"The Richest, Most Provocative Serial Killer Movie In Cinema History" -Kenneth M. Chanko, Newark Star-Ledger
From the award-winning director of The Sweet Hereafter comes "one of the year's riskiest yet most effective films" (Los Angeles Times). Academy Award-nominee Bob Hoskins plays his role like "a sadist with a schoolboy's heart" (Time), creating a powerful, deeply passionate thriller that pulsates with heart-pounding suspense at every turn.
Joseph Hilditch is an eccentric chef who lives in a large country manor. He befriends a young woman named Felicia who has come to town searching for her boyfriend. Felicia is attracted to the seemingly harmless and extremely helpful Hilditch, trusting him, entering his home -- and his life -- only to discover too late that she is not the first woman this man has taken in -- although she may be the last.
3.
Like Hitchcock, Atom Egoyan envisions family life as a potential hotbed of literal or figurative violence and incest. In Felicia's Journey, Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's shattering novel, one dreads to imagine what TV-cook mom (Arsinée Khanjian) did to so damage her pudgy son that grown-up Hilditch (Bob Hoskins) still prepares meals in perfect unison with faded videotapes of her show--and, as we eventually discover, often takes more sinister trips down Memory Lane. Distant kin to Psycho's Tony Perkins, Hoskins's troll is so obsessive, so traumatised, his every short-armed, fat-handed gesture and sing-song utterance is precisely calculated to keep reality safely buried.
Egoyan's movies often seem located underwater, in some surreal dreamscape where one's breath is perpetually suspended while a slow horror seeps ever deeper under the skin. Helpless, transfixed, one watches as his characters drive inexorably toward mined intersections where lives and souls may be lost or redeemed. When Hilditch's path crosses, diverges from and finally coincides with that of young, pregnant Felicia (Elaine Cassidy)--an Irish innocent searching for her errant boyfriend--it leads to terrible epiphany for these fellow travellers. Trouble is, creepy Hilditch and too-naive Felicia come up a bit short in the psychological complexity department, so by film's end, revelatory payoffs are mostly penny ante. Felica's Journey tours familiar Egoyan territory--an industrialised wasteland full of hungry hearts--but this latest fairy tale (think perverse variations on Hansel and Gretel) isn't in the same league with such "family values" masterpieces as Exotica or The Sweet Hereafter. --Kathleen Murphy, Amazon.com
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