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I’m still working to digest Roman Polanski’s beautifully detailed act of witness, The Pianist, and hoping to catch Solaris and Adaptation in the next few days. In the meantime, a few brief notes on Ararat, and a link to a personal Christmas story.  More next Friday.

Atom Egoyan is a methodical man. When distinctions are made between art that`s heavy and art that`s light, he`ll always wind up on the somber, sober, Canadian side of the equation. In all of his features, from the superbly accomplished, like Calendar, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter  to sleek yet unsurprising, like Felicia`s Journey, narrative strategies wreak havoc with expectations. And in the case of Ararat, the strategies may have gone awry. Egoyan has said that this attempt to come to terms with the 1915 Armenian genocide, in which a third of the country`s population was killed, including many members of his family, began as "a straightforward historical story." But not for long.

Stories about storytelling, the moral necessity of legacy and responsibility: as a thinking artist, Egoyan returns to these things. There are many rewards to the complex tapestry of Ararat, which is ill-served by simple synopsis. In contemporary Toronto, a film is being made about historical fact, with movie-style romanticism, while directors, screenwriters, consultants, actors, production assistants, all swirl around each other, dervishes of thematic explication.

Egoyan`s work is best at its most ambiguous, and while there are moments that keen toward didacticism, one of the best conflicts between two characters in his work takes place in Ararat. Ali, a gay, half-Turkish actor (Elias Koteas) playing the role of a cruel military man in the film-within-a-film, has a combative exchange with Raffi, a production assistant (David Alpay) whose immediate family is intimately involved with the production. Facts are spoken as dialogue, yet Koteas and Alpay bring fire and authenticity to their exchanges, and the design of the apartment set, the framing of the shots, are quietly telling. Similarly, there are other scenes of visual and emotional power, some epic, many interpersonal. With Charles Aznavour as the director of the fictional Ararat; Eric Bogosian as its screenwriter; Egoyan`s wife Arsinée Khanjian as the project`s advisor; a wickedly confused Marie-Josée Croze as Raffi`s angry girlfriend (and daughter of his stepfather); and Christopher Plummer as a particularly curious customs officer. 

E-me.