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Atom Egoyan’s new one… about the Armenian genocide
in Turkey in 1915. The
film is very well meaning.
And I would rather go on a death march myself than
watch it again. (Okay, so I’m exaggerating a little…. I’d rather watch Scooby
Doo again than this a second time.)
The story
telling is as convoluted and complex as any Egoyan film.
But this time out, he takes all his emotional moodiness and trumps it with reams and reams of expositional dialogue,
telling us over and over how terrible it was and how it really
happened even though the Turkish government still denies a
genocide and there is little written proof that what is claimed
to have happened actually happened.
That said,
I am willing to believe that it happened and that it happened
just as Egoyan’s characters claim.
What I’m not willing to do is to endure a movie-within-a-movie
that is supposedly made by one of the all-time great directors,
but looks like a cheap TV movie. What I’m not willing to do is to suffer through Chris Plummer’s
bizarre dialogue and actions as a Customs Agent… even if Plummer
does his usual exception job with the thankless role.
What I’m not willing to do is to see the most passionate,
interesting character in the piece reduced to a public nuisance
and a hot bed partner in one scene.
(Here’s a
question… why can’t anyone ever have decent sex in an Atom
Egoyen movie? He hires the most beautiful people and writes
the worst sex lives for them.
Here, the young couple – David Alpay and Marie-Josee
Croze – seem to be just pre-orgasm when neither one of
them gets off and they disengage genitals just seconds before
engaging in a cold, harsh discussion that seems to come from
left field… at least something came somewhere!)
What we get
in Ararat is a movie about the genocide that stars
an American, played by Canadian Bruce Greenwood.
We have a woman who has written a book on the subject
and gives more lectures in a couple of weeks than anyone who
wrote such a book would be likely to give in a year. And we have the son, who ends up carrying four
mystery film cans into the country after a spur-of-the-moment
trip to Turkey.
I don’t mean
to sound as callous as I am about to sound, but we jews have
had decades of experience making narrative movies about the
jewish holocaust of WWII. And we’ve gotten better at it. While the old docs showing thousands of dead
bodies are still valuable as a tool of fact, it rarely requires
such crude footage to make a compelling case. This is the
first narrative Armenian genocide movie in North America that
I know of… and it’s still trying way, way, way too hard.
Sadly, the point of being laughable as often as not.
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