Ararat: Some new critics.

[Guest Fadi]

Now that is open to public... the critics goes better and better.

 

Montreal Gazette

November 22, 2002 Friday Final Edition

 

Egoyan delivers fearless, damning work: Tells horrific story of

armenian genocide. But our most cerebral director eschews linear

narrative to move through time, history and memory

 

by JOHN GRIFFIN

 

Ararat

 

Rating 3

 

Starring: David Alpay, Christopher Plummer, Arsinee Khanjian, Charles

Aznavour, Elias Koteas, Bruce Greenwood.

 

Playing at: AMC; Ex-Centris

 

(with French subtitles)

 

Parents' guide: horrific images, violence, sex, language, partial

nudity.

 

Ararat is a story that had to be told. But did Atom Egoyan have to

make it so complicated? At the heart of the gifted Armenian-

Canadian's epic new film is the genocide of more than one million of

his countrymen by Turkish armed forces in and around 1915. The

horror, tragedy and sheer number of slaughtered innocents has been so

under-reported in all the years since that Hitler used it as an

example of what the Nazis would be able to get away with in their

concentration camps.

 

Now Egoyan has told his story, and not shied away from depicting the

unspeakable atrocities committed by the Turkish government on the

largest Christian minority in the country. Parts of Ararat are almost

unwatchable manifestations of evil.

 

But this being Egoyan - our most cerebral and intellectually busy

film-maker - the historical re-enactment of the 1915 Siege of Van,

described first-hand in Clarence Ussher's book An American Physician

in Turkey, is played as a film within the film that is Ararat. You

might need a program to follow the rest of the action.

 

In modern times, a kid named Raffi (newcomer David Alpay) comes back

from Turkey with sealed cans of film. He is detained at Canadian

Customs by an official named David (Christopher Plummer) who is on

the verge of retirement. Raffi claims the footage has been shot to

supplement a film about the Armenian genocide currently being shot in

Toronto by legendary director Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour).

David isn't sure.

 

An intense psychological examination ensues that, like the rest of

Ararat and Egoyan's body of work, eschews linear narrative to

slipslide through time, history and memory.

 

Among the situations examined: Raffi's relationship to his

art-historian mother, Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), and his troubled

stepsister Celia (Marie-Josee Croze), who blames Ani for her father's

death and takes every opportunity to confront her during her speaking

engagements on the great Armenian painter Arshile Gorky (Simon

Abkarian).

 

David has family issues of his own. He is trying to relate to his gay

son Philip (Brent Carver) and Philip's actor boyfriend Ali (Elias

Koteas), who has just been cast as the despicable Turkish military

commander in Saroyan's production, which is scripted by Eric

Bogosian's Rouben, with input from Ani. Everyone still on the same

page?

 

In any given scene, we might start in a detention cubicle, cut to a

New York loft where Gorky is working on his masterpiece, move back to

Armenia in 1915 to a moment with Gorky and his late mother posing for

the photo that would inspire said masterpiece, and ahead to a lecture

with Ani about the finished picture.

 

To be fair, it is more convoluted on paper than celluloid, and it's

hard to imagine anyone other than Egoyan even attempting such

narrative and stylistic calisthenics. It should also be noted that

the film contains brilliant performances by, among others, a fearless

Koteas, and Bruce Greenwood, who is entirely convincing as the actor

named Martin playing Ussher's altruistic medical doctor under

pressure.

 

Ararat is a similarly fearless work of conscience and ambition. But

curiously, given its core content, it is finally unconvincing. Not as

a statement about the Armenian genocide; the film could not be any

clearer in its damning position. But in attempting to say so much

about how history affects the way families play themselves out, it

may have said too much for us to listen.

 

It remains an essential film. If only Egoyan hadn't made its essence

so hard to access.

 

----------------------------

 

Egoyan's Ararat vivid drama

by Glen Schaefer

 

The Vancouver Province

November 22, 2002 Friday Final Edition

 

"It's difficult for me to imagine these things," says an

Armenian-Canadian art historian (Arsinee Khanjian) near the beginning

of Atom Egoyan's new movie Ararat.

 

The historian has been hired by a movie director (Charles Asna-vour)

to serve as a consultant on a film about a largely forgotten

historical atrocity, the First World War genocide of Armenians by

their Turkish rulers.

 

Egoyan uses the making of this movie-within-a-movie to delicately

delineate how memory, imagination, denial, desire and art clash with

each other and fall short of the reality of a monstrous past. The

director has covered this territory before (The Sweet Hereafter) but

here he tries for a canvas of global scale. And he succeeds by being

forthright about his method, right down to taking us behind the

wooden framework of the movie set. Khanjian's character objects to

fictional liberties taken with that movie-within-a-movie. Vancouver's

Bruce Greenwood doesn't play the American doctor who witnessed much

of the atrocities; he plays an actor playing that doctor. Similarly

Elias Koteas plays an actor of partly Turkish descent who plays the

movie's brutal Turkish officer.

 

Wondering and imagining make up much of these characters' lives.

 

The art historian's husband died attempting to assassinate a Turkish

diplomat and their Canadian-born son (newcomer David Alpay) is

obsessed with understanding his father's motives to the point of

going to Turkey himself looking for answers. Ararat's story is framed

by his return to Canada and interrogation by a suspicious customs

officer (Christopher Plummer).

 

The woman's second husband committed suicide -- or died accidentally

-- and her son and his stepsister (Marie-Josee Croze) are in love.

Those subplots show memory and denial shaping the personal as well as

the historical spheres.

 

The act of portraying the genocide can't approach the reality, as the

movie honestly acknowledges. But the movie is self-aware enough to

know the profound role art can play in remembering. A key character

is an Armenian painter in New York during the 1930s, who escaped the

genocide as an orphaned boy and whose signature painting becomes an

iconic reminder of the genocide.

 

A pivotal moment has Alpay's character reading an eyewitness account

of an atrocity to the customs agent, as the movie cuts to the witness

herself telling the story, then pans to the scene being described,

and then pulls back to include the director and crew filming the

actors. It's history, art and remembering in microcosm, a telling,

re-telling and depiction.

 

There's no trickery in this movie. Egoyan is confident enough to

acknowledge film's artifice, its techniques and its power to

manipulate, while at the same time harnessing those powers to vivid,

anguished effect.

 

REVIEW

 

Ararat

 

Rating: 4 (out of four)

 

---------------------------

 

Ararat can't support weight of story's ambition

by Katherine Monk

 

Vancouver Sun

November 22, 2002 Friday Final Edition

 

ARARAT

 

Starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Marie-Josee

Croze, Bruce Greenwood, Arsinee Khanjian, Elias Koteas and

Christopher Plummer.

 

14A. 115 min. Rating 3

 

Atom Egoyan's Ararat is not so much a movie as it is an intellectual

argument played out through cinematic device.

 

An exhaustive -- and somewhat exhausting -- epistemological

examination of history, the movie asks us about the validity of the

historical record, the emotional value of firsthand accounts and the

ever-present potential for political rhetoric to supplant the

ephemeral truth of the moment. Yes, it's a big honkin' ball o' wax,

but if there's anyone who can translate abstractions into the

concrete language of the screen, it's Egoyan.

 

Using the perpetually denied Armenian genocide as his central

narrative hub, Egoyan departs on a variety of tangents.

 

They include a sub-plot about a sexual relationship between two

step-siblings, an art history professor struggling to understand the

artwork of an Armenian survivor who eventually kills himself, a young

man of Armenian descent held up at customs after he is suspected of

smuggling and a movie-within-a-movie device where Charles Aznavour

plays a director trying to shoot a film about the Armenian genocide

in modern-day Toronto.

 

These subplots splinter off and recombine throughout the film, making

Ararat one of the most interesting experiments in film structure

since Memento. Unfortunately, the layers don't always dovetail the

way we might want, or with all the emotional subtlety we've come to

expect from our homegrown genius.

 

Every single piece of Ararat feels heavy, and that's because it is.

 

As a man of Armenian descent married to a woman (Arsinee Khanjian)

who grew up in Beirut -- whose ancestors were part of the Armenian

diaspora -- Egoyan has an intimate relationship with this politically

charged subject matter.

 

Also, as the first person to really tackle the genocide in a movie,

the weight of responsibility would have been enormous -- and you can

feel it.

 

The scenes feel stiff and emotionally remote. Certainly, this is

partly intentional -- not to mention one of Egoyan's fortes -- as a

way of showing us the impact of denial, and the frustration of trying

to access a cultural memory that is relayed, not experienced.

 

A systematic deconstruction of the modalities of the historic

process, Egoyan attempts to up the emotional ante and bring us closer

to the horrific hub with each scene.

 

At first, we spiral above the invisible corpses that form the core of

the film like so many disembodied souls. This is because we are

accessing that hub through the distant intellectuals who populate the

film's universe. They are analytical, not emotional, leaving us

hungry for some sense of genuine connection.

 

As each revolution takes us closer to emotional ground zero, the cool

layers are stripped away and some jagged moments punch through the

containment field. These moments turn out to be rather jarring as the

subtext is suddenly brought to the surface in spontaneous eruptions

of angst and anger.

 

There is one sequence with Bruce Greenwood that is simply painful as

he rambles on in an embarrassing moment of self-righteousness about a

disruption on the set. It destroys the slow and subtle rhythm of the

film, and things get worse from there as the delicate balance between

the past and the present, between emotional inaccessibility and the

emotional connection gets pushed to one side. Without the narrative

restraint that Egoyan is noted for, the movie flies off the rails and

into dramatic hyperbole.

 

I still enjoyed watching this film, and almost more for the flaws

because they break the calm surface and throw you in the muddy puddle

that Egoyan himself seems to be swimming in: How do you represent

history? How does history change who we are?

 

I also found the movie quite moving, because it's open enough -- and

let's face it, weird enough -- to let you access it in which ever way

you want. Pain is a universal, and this movie has plenty of doors and

windows to crawl through.

 

My main problems with the film have nothing to do with the film's

internal logic and it's intellectual realization -- which is superb.

My problems are straightforward and superficial: I found lead actor

David Alpay weak in the central role because he was unable to deliver

a layered performance

 

Over all, Ararat is one of the most ambitious movies ever made in

this country and a fascinating dissection of the modalities of

history, but one that suffers from its own ambitions as it tries to

be too much for too many.

 

-----------------------

 

Shades of tragedy:

Atom Egoyan makes the political personal with his take on the Armenian

holocaust, Ararat

By Isa Tousignant

 

Nov. 21 to Nov, 27, 2002

Hour Montreal

 

Trust Atom Egoyan to choose the Armenian genocide as a backdrop for

extrapolations on the nature of love and lineage.

 

Never one to simplify things, our favourite national mannerist is back to

his old antics with his latest, Ararat. It's a complex (some would say

complicated) film about disheartened (some would say jaded) people, as could

be expected. It features his habitual troupe - wife Arsinée Khanjian, Elias

Koteas, Bruce Greenwood - but expands it with Christopher Plummer and none

other than the internationally famous French Armenian chansonnier Charles

Aznavour. Québécoise actress Marie-Josée Croze (Maëlstrom) also features

prominently.

 

The mix is odd, but reflects the narrative. There are many, many different

subplots in this film, as well as temporal jumps, interconnected

relationships between seemingly dissociated characters, and significances

hinted at but not always explained.

 

Raffi (played by the impressive newcomer David Alpay) is a young Armenian

Canadian living in Toronto, whose father died as a freedom fighter in a

missed attempt at killing a Turkish diplomat. His mother (Khanjian) is an

art historian, a specialist in the work and life of real-life painter

Arshille Gorky (who features in flashbacks, played by Simon Abkarian). She

is asked to serve as a professional resource in the making of a film by

Edward Saroyan (Aznavour), a movie about the 1915-18 Armenian holocaust,

which Gorky survived.

 

What we witness is the making of the film, which serves as a site for

historical reconstructions. We also jump sporadically into the life of

Gorky, as he works in his New York studio in the 1940s, and spend quite some

time watching Raffi in present-time as his relationships with both his

mother and his girlfriend Celia (Croze) unravel. Celia happens to be his

ex-step-sister - she was until her own father died by falling off a cliff.

She is troubled by his unexplained death, and blames Raffi's mother for it.

Christopher Plummer comes into the mix as a Canada Customs officer who stops

Raffi at the border after he makes a soul-searching journey to Turkey.

 

Simple it is not, and at times the film suffers from its own excess. But as

always with Egoyan, the layers do combine to make an intelligent, evocative

whole. The Armenian genocide is not a widely discussed (or even

acknowledged) subject, as the film points out, yet its effects continue to

find repercussions in millions of lives. Egoyan's multi-temporal,

multi-directional references to it serve to demonstrate the variety of

effects it has had and continues to have.

 

For Raffi, the pain of his people represents a personal affront, and his

father's death an act of small heroism. Can he absorb this thorny heritage

as part of his own identity? Is the ghost of a dead father as heavy a burden

regardless of the nature of his death, whether political suicide or tragic

accident? Egoyan doesn't help us simplify issues, but he does offer an

interesting panoply to ponder.

 

Ararat

 

[ November 24, 2002, 08:07 AM: Message edited by: Domino ]

[wh00t]

You forgot the Montreal Mirror, which callled ARARAT a "deadly bore". This comes a few months after they ran a cover story on Egoyan.

 

Cover story: http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/200...02/upfront.html

[Guest Fadi]

"ARARAT

 

 

 

Those of you who have been following our coverage of this year’s festival will be pleased to hear that we managed to make it in for last night’s screening of Ararat (non-gala edition). Despite their obligations at the gala only a half an hour later, Piers Handling, Robert Lantos and Atom and Arsinee came to the screening to introduce the film. Which I personally think is further proof of how hard our festival works to appeal to the film going public rather than catering solely to the industry elite.

 

 

 

I was brought up to trust the critics, so what I have to say next goes against everything I was raised to believe (trust me it’s like a fundamentalist Christian suddenly realizing that all those animals couldn’t have fit on the Ark – a fitting example since the Ark reached dry ground at Ararat). I have been anticipating this movie since I first heard about it about a year and a half ago. I have read all the reviews and the reactions to it’s screening at Cannes. I have but one thing to say: the critics are morons.

 

 

 

I will begin not with the reactions that Ararat has received as a film, but as a film about a subject that we as a society know very little about and would like it to stay that way thank you very much. Since its debut at Cannes, we have heard about the controversy. This film deals with the Armenian genocide, in which the Christian Armenian population of Turkey were systematically slaughtered and expelled from Anatolia in 1915. This happened, it is a fact. Much like the holocaust happened. No one asks for “the other side of the story” when a film is made about the Nazis. The Nazis killed the Jews. Why? Well, for no good reason at all. The Turks killed the Armenians. Why? Well, for no good reason at all. There are no other sides to the story. This doesn’t mean that all Germans are bad, or that all Turks are bad, but it does mean that the behaviour of their government and a good share of their citizenry at the time of these genocides is completely inexcusable and failure to admit to these crimes is one of the greatest sins in history. So what is the difference? Well, to begin with, whereas the Germans were forced to come to terms with their crimes at Nuremberg and after; the Turkish government has yet to admit that the Armenian Genocide ever occurred. And god forbid that we should offend the Turks. So instead, let’s accuse Atom Egoyan of telling a one-sided story. Because it is possible after all that all those Armenian women and children were actually working to subvert the Turkish state and deserved to be slaughtered. Or maybe it’s a big lie and nobody died at all. Just like the holocaust. Ooh, that sentence didn’t go over very well did it? Exactly, think about it. The fact of the matter is the Armenian Genocide occurred, the Holocaust occurred, genocides occurred in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. To deny that these events took place is a crime against all of the people who died in these genocides, those who survived and their families; and it guarantees that it will occur again to some group of people somewhere. The Armenian Genocide doesn’t become fact when the Turks accept it, it already is.

 

 

 

Which brings us to the movie. The film itself has received less than glowing reviews. Part of this is for the “one-sidedness” which we have already discussed. The other major criticism of the film is its “confusing” style – it deals with a movie within a movie. I was confused by that Backstreet Boys video “The Call”, so I’m hardly the smartest cookie on the block when it comes to deconstructing film, but this movie was not confusing. What it seems the critics fail to grasp is that this movie is not actually about the Armenian genocide. If you want to learn about the Armenian genocide read a book. I take issue with people who rely on movies for their history. This movie is about coming to terms with the truth, even when it is painful. It is about the importance of dealing with our collective histories rather than forgetting or denying them. This is a very important film. The critics wanted Schindler’s List, but they didn’t get it. Schindler’s List was not an important film. Atom Egoyan is not a historian; he is an Armenian-Canadian filmmaker. This movie deals with his reality.

 

 

 

The movie takes place in modern day Toronto and explores the lives of people interconnected through the making of a film about the Armenian Genocide. The film being made is the movie that the Toronto critics would have liked to have seen – a retelling of the genocide. Ani, played by Arsinee Khanjian, is an art historian studying genocide survivor Arshille Gorky who is hired as a consultant. The film deals with her relationship with her son and stepdaughter (played by David Alpay and Marie-Josee Croze) as they struggle to come to terms with the deaths of their fathers. The director of the movie, Edward Saroyan (played by French singer Charles Aznavour) is committed to make the movie in memory of his mother, herself a genocide survivor. The character that has faced the greatest criticism is that of Ali (played by Elias Koteas) who is hired to play the role of the Turkish commander who perpetrated the genocide in the town of Van. At one point Ali, who is half Turkish, admits to the director that he is not convinced that what happened to the Armenians was genocide. The charge has been made that Egoyan is therefore portraying the Armenians as good, and the Turks as bad. This is not the point of this character at all. It is clear that, while clearly misguided, Ali does not hate Armenians; he is not “evil”, he was not brought up with a knowledge this atrocity and like many people in society he is a man unwilling to face up to the crimes of his ancestors. At one point the character states that we are all here in Canada now, in a new country where we can forget about the past. Egoyan rejects this notion – we must not live in the past, but we must confront it.

 

 

 

It is not a perfect film. The lives of the characters sometimes connect too conveniently and at times the role of the stepdaughter seems superfluous to the plot. But it is a moving film. It is a film that deals with an event that occurred in another time and place, but faces issues confronting us in present day North America. I take issue with the critics not because they didn’t like the film, but because they criticize Egoyan for not making the film that they wanted him to make."

 

http://www.loopytoronto.com/ararat.html