Review by Harvey Karten
3 stars out of 4
Before Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews, the German
leader told his skeptical commanding officers, "Who remembers
the massacre of Armenians? He was talking about the program
by the Ottoman Turkish government to exterminate its Armenian
citizens in Eastern Turkey, a program that actually begin at the
close of the 19th Century but continued in full, horrendous force in
1915 and shortly thereafter, when one million Armenians were
massacred by Turkish troops. There is a likelihood that even if
the Turkish government today admitted the role of their
predecessors eighty-seven years ago (they deny everything), the
public would not become too aroused given the enormous
suffering brought on by ethnic cleansing sponsored by insane
governments during the 20th century including those of Rwanda
and Bosnia and Cambodia. To remedy that situation in part,
Atom Egoyan goes back to his own Armenian roots and those of
his wife, Arsinee Khanjian, who plays a major role in Egoyan's
latest, Canadian-made production.
"Ararat," named for the mountain that is Armenia's leading
spiritual symbol and whose presence is felt in the film, is a
difficult work, difficult not so much in the sense that it requires a
knowledge of history (it really doesn't since the scenes of
massacres are self-explanatory) but that it demands careful
attention to the flawed relationships at the heart of the story.
Directed by Egoyan as a film within a film and moving backwards
and forwards as is the Canadian director's wont, "Ararat" bites off
more than it can chew. By putting the present-day human
relationships in greater importance than the tragic events of 1915-
however justifiable in that the present-day affairs can be linked
psychologically to the holocaust-Egoyan makes us at once wish
that he had concentrated on a full-scale historical film in the
manner of other holocaust films this year such as "The Grey
Zone," "Amen," and "The Pianist" or that he had dealt purely with
a psychological study in the style of his previous wonderful works
such as "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Exotica."
Egoyan opens in the present in the home of Philip (Brent
Carver) whose father, David (Christopher Plummer) is a customs
inspector with whom Philip is having difficulties and regrets the
invitation he extended to his dad. David, who at his customs post
at the airport has recently admitted an Armenian film director and
pomegranate lover Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) to
Canada, is about to retire but appears to have considerable time
on his hands even while working for his government. Having
detained Raffi (David Alpay) on suspicion of carrying drugs in a
couple of cans of film, he takes the young man into the back room
for interrogation and uses the time to learn about-and give us in
the audience-a background to the 1915 massacre.
This is Egoyan's "heaviest" film to date in the sense that there
are no words wasted and that each conversation, seemingly
banal, carries the weight of its individual's probing for identity, for
meaning, for truth about the holocaust and about his or her own
life. Included in the cross-cutting between the film-within-a-film
are Raffi's mother, Ani (Arsinee Khanjian) a professor of art history
who is frequently challenged at her lectures by audience members
who differ with her interpretations of the past; Philip's male friend
Ali (Elias Koteas), who is half-Turkish, denies that the holocaust
ever took place and has gained a major role in Aznavour's film as
a sadistic Turkish commander Jevdet Bey; Bruce Greenwood has
taken the role of Usher, an artist whose principal painting decades
ago is a ten-year work meant to allow us in the present to
memorialize the massacre.
Among the performers, the stand-out is that of a pre-med
student David Alpay. Alpay performs in the role of a mature
young man intent on preserving the memory of the massacre but
who is estranged from his mother and has a complex romantic
relationship with his stepsister, Celia (Marie-Josee Croze).
Alpay's role should put him in good standing when various critics'
groups vote their awards for Best Debut Performance,''
Whatever its flaws, "Ararat" deserves to be seen if only because
there are few other films dealing with the subject of the murder of
a million people who considered themselves Turkish citizens, as
loyal to the Ottomans as the Jews were to Germany, and who are
shocked that the people who were supposed to protect them
turned on them instead.
Copyright © 2002 Harvey Karten
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