Ararat - Guardian Review - 20 May 2002

Atom Egoyan's latest tackles the hugely controversial subject of the Turkish massacres of Armenians during the first world war. It's a shame, says Derek Malcolm, that the film suffers from overreach.

Atom Egoyan, the Canadian-Armenian film-maker, says his new film Ararat is a "meditation on the spiritual role of art in the process of struggling for meaning and redemption in the aftermath of genocide". And it is clearly a deeply personal film which takes as its subject the wholesale massacre of Armenians by the Turks in Ottoman Turkey during the first world war.

The massacre, of over a million men, women and children, is denied by the present-day Republic of Turkey, but there is no doubt that something terrible did take place and that relations between the two nations are still strained today.

Unfortunately, Egoyan attempts too much in his film and stumbles with script, acting and an over-complicated structure. This is a work quite unlike anything else he has attempted. There are themes from his previous films included, but it lacks his usual certainty and often seems both incoherent and unsatisfactory.
It is partly an historical re-enactment in which Charles Aznavour plays a well-known Armenian director making a film based on a book called An American Physician in Turkey. The film depicts the siege of Van which precipitated the massacre of 1915. The rest of the film looks at the lives of two families, at the centre of which is an 18-year-old boy (David Apley) and a man on the verge of retirement (Christopher Plummer).

The boy, an Armenian, returns to Canada from Turkey with cans of 35mm film and digital tapes.The older man is a customs official who is sure he is concealing something. According to the boy, the cans contain additional material of a film to be made in Toronto but the official learns that the film is already completed and an intense psychological examination begins.We learn that his mother is an art historian specialising in the work of the great Armenian expressionist Arshile Gorky, who committed suicide. There are many other complications.

Obviously, the film is meant to be taken on several different levels. It is a dramatised piece of history, an examination of how art can reflect such history and a probe into personal relationships affected by past tragedies.

One wishes one could say, given the palpable sincerity behind the enterprise, that the mix works better. But too often it is both confusing and ponderously dramatised. There are, of course, good moments, and Plummer as the customs officer supplies most of them. But the "ancient terrain of lies, deception, denial, fact and fears" of which Egoyan speaks only occasionally comes alive. We are left to reflect on what might have been rather than what is actually on the screen.