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Ararat
**1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of July 4, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. Canada.
115 minutes. Written and directed by Atom Egoyan. Starring David Alpay,
Arsinée Khanjian, Christopher Plummer, Charles Aznavour, Marie-Josée
Croze, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver, Bruce Greenwood, Elias Koteas, Simon
Abkarian, Lousnak.
There's something that I like to call the 'it'
movie. The dream project that a lot of auteur directors carry around in their
heads for years, which they can't go ahead with until their careers and talents
have matured, and cannot describe in anything but uncommercial language.
It may not be a hit, it may indeed turn out to be crap, but it will not get
out of the filmmaker's system until he has gone ahead and made it. The 'it'
movie is intimidating, and still, it has to be done.
Sometimes they turn out to be great, at other
times they're disasters, and there are those rare occasions when they fall
somewhere in between. For Spielberg, it was "Schindler's List", for Scorsese,
"Gangs of New York". Michael Cimino's 'it' movie was "Heaven's Gate", and
darn if it didn't go and destroy his whole career. (If I ever decide to go
into filmmaking, my 'it' piece would probably be "Guns in the Sky", an
exploration of partisanship in American politics, set in the 1980s and drawing
visual influence from the styles of guys like Martin Brest and Tony Scott.
But that's a story for another time.)
Atom Egoyan's "Ararat" doesn't seem
to fit into the pattern; these movies tend to be big and carelessly passionate,
which is why film lovers normally sense them at first whiff and give them
one extreme reaction or another. But I'm doing my amateur psychologist bit,
and assuming that it is in fact an 'it'. The movie's flaws ring of
underconfidence, as if Egoyan got paranoid about the movie meaning too much
to him, obsessed about being able to see it from the outside and intellectualised
its parts until he ended up draining them of power.
The film revolves around the Armenian genocide
of 1915, when the Turkish army murdered one and a half million citizens of
Armenian descent. There's a historical controversy around whether or not
this actually happened, although it seems to stem from the fact that Turkey's
government is unwilling to admit any guilt. Scholars who deny the mass killings
tend to simply be reciting the official line; several books have been published
with documentary evidence, and even George W. Bush made a campaign promise
to get the Turks to own up, before realising that he would need to keep them
sweet if he wanted to invade Iraq.
Egoyan is a Canadian filmmaker of Armenian origin;
the genocide is an issue close to his heart. He's not only pained by the
events themselves, but the fact that nobody seems willing to bring them out
in the open and engage in the kinds of discussions that might lead to
understanding and healing. From what the characters in this movie say, I
get the feeling that a large part of Armenian anger comes from a feeling
of unfair shame -- these people feel hated, and don't get why, when all they
are asking is that the truth be told.
All this should have made for a powerful and important
work of art, except "Ararat" has too much going on, crammed into scenes that
play too deliberately to reach the gut as well as the mind. There are several
plot lines taking place at once: Charles Aznavour plays a director making
a film about the Siege of Van. Arsinée Khanjian, who wrote the book
that Aznavour's film is based on, is having a troubled relationship with
her former stepdaughter (Marie-Josée Croze), who keeps coming up with
different theories about how Khanjian must have killed her father, either
actually or indirectly. Croze is also having an affair with her former
stepbrother (David Alpay), who spends most of the film in customs on the
way back from Turkey, explaining the background history to an official
(Christopher Plummer) who wants to know what's in the film cans the kid is
carrying.
The stories are not as confusing as they might
sound, unfolding in scenes of quiet, delicate passion. Aznavour, Khanjian
and Alpay do a lot of standing around with their mouths open, acting very
solemn and looking as if they're about to break down and cry, but their
characters are carrying around big wounds, so the earnestness makes sense,
and it is balanced nicely by Plummer, who slyly, intelligently makes like
he has something up his sleeve for Alpay while communicating his own emotional
journey under the surface. "Ararat" has more of a problem in that it feels
like a movie made out of parts.
I can understand what Egoyan is trying to do:
In making the film-within-a-film, he gets to dramatise events without going
through the motions of making a historical epic, and by setting his own film
in the modern day, he gets to concentrate on emotional reverberations rather
than picky details. The rivalry between Khanijian and Croze shows how the
pain of loss can sometimes cloud judgement over the facts, and the ending
of Alpay's thread ends up symbolising how the unresolved mess of the Armenian
genocide issue carries its way through the generations and hands down the
potential for lives to be ruined by crazed passion.
I know all that, and yet I knew it when I was
watching "Ararat". Instead of being absorbed, the movie felt like a series
of compartments, inviting me to study their own construction. It doesn't
help that the film is shot in tight, dark, claustrophobic frames -- a story
with this much information, and this much feeling, needs more of an epic
canvas, so the audience has room to breathe and take it all in. The Croze
story does not belong in a movie that's trying to convince us of righteous
anger, because its message seems to sympathise with those who deny that the
genocide ever happened. And the way the scenes in the customs house reveal
themselves is absorbing, but too close to the secretive unfoldings of Egoyan's
best previous films, "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter". He's boiled his
own style down to a formula in order to play it safe, when it might have
been better to gamble, and throw things out onto the page the way he felt
them.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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