Friday, November 15, 2002

Can’t we all just get along?

One has only to pick up a newspaper or leaf through a history book for an answer. For filmmaker Atom Egoyan neither the question nor the resolution can be handled with simplicity.

Ararat, unquestionably his most ambitious film, grapples with emotional strife on both a vast and intimate canvas. Sometimes literally on a canvas. It marches through time as several stories unfold irrespective of semi-detached parallel sagas, but all inevitably conspiring to converge. Conveying its essence suggests a schematic plan that’s more adroit than what’s on screen. The dramatic outline is ragged, not crude. It’s a high wire act performed without a net in which the performer’s unsteadiness assures that we will be anxious. How much of that is played to the audience and to what degree it’s unintentional results in a film that is as much daunting as it is compelling.

The film is centered emotionally rather than in its narrative. The once revered French filmmaker Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) has come to Canada to fulfill a promise made to his mother to make a film about the Armenian holocaust. The spokes emanating from this venture include Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), the author of a book on artist Arshile Gorky who’s hired as a technical consultant on the movie; her son Raffi (David Alpay), whose exposure to the story rekindles his Armenis roots; and David (Christopher Plummer), an imminently retiring Canadian immigration officer who interviews David upon his return from Armenia.

Additionally, we witness the making of Saroyan’s film, an epic distilled down to the basics and several festering personal dramas that have yet to be lanced.

On a very basic level Ararat is constructed on a theoretical level more attuned to music than the movies. In an abstract way it’s reminiscent of the work of Charles Ives whose Herculean symphonies were thought to be unplayable (many were never produced in his lifetime or long after he stopped composing) because they called for a leap of faith as sections of the orchestra pursued different and independent themes that would cross paths and depart. Performance ultimately validated Ives genius.

In its own way Egoyan’s film is as dense and unpredictable. The making of the film-within-a-film does not bode well for what the equally fictional audience will see on the screen. It’s stiff and preachy with the movie actors toiling vigilantly to provide some flesh to hastily conceived portraits. Ani has been enlisted to assist in creating an undocumented thread involving Gorky as a boy during the period that coincides with the First World War. She’s dumbfounded by the screenwriter’s (Eric Bogosian) zeal to bend the drama to facilitate some notion of commercial appeal, asking him where she can apply for the artistic license he’s fond of invoking.

The director’s sly aside suggests he toyed with a more traditional, historical approach to the material before taking an impressionistic perspective. Taking on the subject head on had to be quixotic and that’s well conveyed in this facet of the movie. The slaughter and coverup of Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks between 1915-1918 is conveyed in broad strokes. It’s a sufficient primer that allows for rumination.

Egoyan, who’s acknowledged his awareness of the event is rather recent, works diligently to tie the echoes of the past with contemporary resonance. Ali (Elias Koteas), an actor playing a Turkish commander in Saroyan’s film, ultimately confronts Raffi with the big questions and issues. He wonders whether his own Turkish ancestry played a part in his casting, maintaining more than just skepticism of the movie’s veracity. He embodies the classic traits of holocaust denial beginning with its exclusion in the schoolroom and concluding with the cozy notion that the passage of time has erased all elements of relevancy.

What Ali’s defense slides over - and consumes Raffi - is what conspired to make the Armenians so hated and allowed the Turks to justify their savagery. Egoyan and his characters, let alone countless chroniclers, can only hope to identify the nature of the beast. Passion and logic, as exemplified in several of the other stories, can be employed to address and obscure conduct, often simultaneously.

Ani’s daughter has presumably given up on reason as a means of confronting her mother with the unknowable truth of her father’s death/suicide. Now she employs blitzkrieg tactics that are equally ineffective in breaking down the walls.

Even more telling is the give and take that runs through David’s interrogation of Raffi. On his last day on the job, David not only wants to go out on a professional high note, he views the young man as a touchstone to his own son and a relationship in dire need of reconciliation. Their exchange is Socratic but all the while the older man probes to uncover the “lie” in Raffi’s testimony. It’s a game not about justice but truth and how we cope with it. Perhaps, it will tell us something about our own attributes and deficiencies and allow us to change.

Handsomely produced with a first rate cast, “Ararat” confronts us with the real mountain of the title and its hopelessly inadequate papier-mâché counterpart. Both serve their purpose. Still, the majesty and honesty of one towers over the convenience of the other and that perspective is worthy of the struggle.

A Sony Pictures release of an Alliance Atlantis/Serendipity Point production. Produced by Robert Lantos and Atom Egoyan. Direction/screenplay, Egoyan. Camera, Paul Sarossy. Editor, Susan Shipton. Music, Mychael Danna. Production design, Phillip Barker. Costumes, Beth Pasternak.

Cast: David Alpay (Raffi), Charles Aznavour (Edward Saroyan), Eric Bogosian (Rouben), Brent Carver (Philip), Marie-Josee Croze (Celia), Bruce Greenwood (Martin/Clarence Ussher), Arsinee Khanjian (Ani), Elias Koteas (Ali/Jevdet Bey), Christopher Plummer (David).

 

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