"Ararat"
Miramax Films
Written and directed by Atom Egoyan
Produced by Robert Lantos and Atom Egoyan
Starring David Alpay, Arsinée Khanjian, Christopher Plummer, Charles Aznavour, Marie-Josée Croze, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver, Bruce Greenwood, Elias Koteas, Simon Abkarian and Lousnak
Rated R
Opens tomorrow at the Broadway
(out of four)

"Ararat" is a sincere film by a great filmmaker who has many things to say about the Armenian genocide committed in Turkey in 1915 and tries to say them in an interesting way. Unfortunately, he has a little too much to say and he says it with a structure that uncharacteristically undermines his message, creating a failed film that is tempting to recommend because at least it fails while attempting to be interesting. It’s too complex to get what should have been a simple but strong message across.

The writer/director is Canadian Atom Egoyan, who has made such sweeping emotional films as "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter." "Exotica," which came out around the same time as "Pulp Fiction," ventured into the time bending structure in ways that Tarantino’s masterpiece didn’t to reveal character details from different time periods and arrive at a moving conclusion.

Egoyan toys even more with time in "Ararat," moving from multiple modern stories while unfolding multiple events from the past as well, making a summary of the plot a daunting task.

In the present, or within a year of the present if a strand introduced later is the actual present, there is an art historian named Ani (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife) of Armenian descent who is an expert on Armenian painter Arshile Gorky. Her research shows that Gorky was a child who witnessed parts of the genocide and Armenian defense against the Turks. Ani has just completed a book about the painter, who is shown in several flashbacks as a grown man in New York City painting his most famous painting, which was done from a picture of him with his mother.

A famed director named Edward (Charles Aznavour) is making a film about the genocide, and would like to add a fictionalized account of young Gorky’s involvement to promote awareness of the painter, so he hires Ani as a technical adviser. Edward’s film takes its screenplay from a diary by Clarence Ussher (Bruce Greenwood plays Martin, who plays Ussher in the film), a U.S. doctor who witnessed the events.

Meanwhile, Ani’s son Raffi (David Alpay) is romantically involved with his stepsister Celia (Marie-Josee Croze), the daughter of Ani’s second husband. Raffi’s father died as a "freedom fighte," or a terrorist, depending on who tells it, and Celia’s father fell off a cliff, although she blames Ani and at one point suspects her of murder. Celia uses her relationship with Raffi to terrorize Ani and read her book prior to publication to look for clues.

Ali (Elias Koteas) is the actor playing Jevdet Bey, the Turkish general who plotted to find a legal loophole for the genocide. In his research for the role, Ali reads that the genocide might have only been an act of war. Edward walks away from these questions, but Raffi, who gets a job as a production assistant on the film, wants Edward to understand the past, mentioning that Hitler used the genocide to convince his men that no one would remember what happened.

The strongest, pure Egoyan, thread of the film involves Raffi at the airport customs desk after returning from the site of the massacre at an undisclosed time. He has four cans of sealed film, which can’t be opened because it’s exposed. Raffi says that it was shot for the film, and slowly reveals elements of the truth to the customs inspector, David (Christopher Plummer). David is the disapproving father of Phillip (Brent Carver), Ali’s lover who works at the museum housing the Gorky exhibit.

David is on his final day of the job before retirement. Rather than simply take the cans into a dark room, he wants to test his skills and find out the truth.
Feel free to read the last six paragraphs seven or eight more times before continuing.

Egoyan creates strong payoffs in the customs story and in the scenes of Gorky painting, but fails to make a point about the genocide, the matter closest to his heart.

For people familiar with this type of structure, it won’t be incredibly difficult to follow the story, but the film will serve more as an educational tool than a successful work of art. By placing all the events of the genocide in a film within a film, Egoyan distances the atrocities that are intended to be hard-hitting.

The result from watching the scenes is that they feel like the actors are playing actors playing roles in a film, which is to some degree distorting of events. In one scene, Ani notices a painting of the famous Mount Ararat on the set, which she says wouldn’t have been visible from the town. Yes, but it’s there due to poetic license, she’s told. And while film audiences must be willing to accept poetic license, it’s detrimental to point it out while they’re watching the film.

Several times, the camera backs out of the historical scenes to reveal the cameras and show Raffi watching the events and understanding his heritage. But why not simply tell the story of the genocide?

It becomes unclear if Edward has made an accurate depiction of the massacre, or an exploitative film. Maybe Egoyan didn’t want to face that obstacle himself, so he created the film within a film as a work by another director. At the end, a title card reveals that all the events in the film are taken from Ussher’s diary, but by that time, they’ve already lost credibility and therefore any emotional impact.

Egoyan, who was born in Egypt to Armenian parents, clearly holds the material close to his heart, and wanted to show both the genocide and how the Armenian people live with the stories and the denial today. He could have made a statement with simple grace, but instead went for complexities that would explain everything. Much is explained in the film, but—as is rarely the case with Egoyan—not enough is felt.
jeremy@red-mag.com