Ararat

If a million people died and nobody remembers the story did it really happen? In 1915 the Turkish government turned on its own citizens and killed or forcefully deported a million Armenians. “Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?” A line allegedly spoken by Hitler to his top generals to quell their concerns of getting away with the Holocaust. Atom Egoyan’s new movie Ararat tries to tell the story of the Armenian genocide, and a the same time remind of us of film’s inability to tell the whole story.

As he did in “The Sweet Hereafter” and “Exotica” he uses criss-crossing timelines, and interlocking character arcs to try to reveal all the layers of the story. At one level he’s just trying to tell a little known story about the Armenian genocide. Interwoven with that is questions about cultural identity and heritage, hatred, truth and family. It is easily his most ambitious film to date, but perhaps because the material is so personal (Atom Egoyan is part Armenian) it gets muddled. He seems to force detachment from the story in order to tell it truthfully and in doing so that emotional connection is missing.

The film is filled with clever devices to further the story. Such as how to get at the truth of what’s in the sealed film canisters during the custom’s scenes. The mother-son relationship between Gorky and his mother and Raffi and his mother. Ani’s attempts to explain her second husband’s death parallels her son’s attempts to understand what happened to the Armenian people. The big one is of course the movie-within-a-movie. In Ararat’s movie-within-a-movie we see a film called Ararat being filmed. As we watch and hear the discussion between writer, director, actor and historian it’s clear a movie only captures a small part of the story. All these devices further the story in clever and insightful ways, but at the cost of forming an emotional connection with the story, which is what leaves me ultimately unfulfilled.

Mount Ararat is depicted in the film and serves to remind us of the challenge we face as we struggle to accept our inability as observers of history, and participants, to understand the whole story. It’s also a reminder of the challenge Egoyan set for himself in trying to understand what happened in 1915 and how its effects continue to ripple through nations and individuals even today.