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'The Cut': Venice Review

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  • 'The Cut': Venice Review

    Hollywood Reporter
    Aug 31 2014


    'The Cut': Venice Review
    4:25 AM PDT 8/31/2014 by Boyd van Hoeij

    The Bottom Line

    An Armenian blacksmith can't speak and doesn't seem to have all that much to say

    Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
    Cast: Tahar Rahim
    Director: Fatih Akin

    Turkish-German director Fatih Akin completes his 'Love, Death and the
    Devil' trilogy with this drama starring French actor Tahar Rahim ('A
    Prophet')

    VENICE -- A mute blacksmith father goes on a trip across the
    continents in search of his daughters in The Cut, an ambitious but
    only intermittently stirring historical epic from Turkish-German
    director Fatih Akin. It's pretty remarkable that a director of Turkish
    origins has decided to tell a story that starts in the 1915 Ottoman
    Empire and in which an Armenian plays the lead, since that is the year
    the oft-denied genocide of the Armenians took place. But the narrative
    continues through 1923, pushing the fate of a people into the
    background for a rather generic search-and-survival story.

    The third segment of the director's Love, Death and the Devil trilogy,
    after the acclaimed Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, this will generate
    a decidedly more mixed response. However, the film has been presold in
    many territories, with a staggering 10 countries alone represented on
    the seemingly endless list of co-producers.

    Nazaret Manoogian (French actor Tahar Rahim, from A Prophet) is a
    blacksmith in Mardin, a town in present-day Turkey near the border
    with Syria. His wife (Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra) and two young
    children, the twins Lucinee and Arsinee (Dina and Zein Fakhoury), are
    separated from him when the Ottomans join WWI and Nazar, like all
    Armenian men, is drafted and ends up being forced to work as a road
    builder in the desert.

    The entire crew of Armenian workers is executed by a gang of bandits
    and mercenaries, though Nazar manages to survive because the thief
    (Bartu Kucukcaglayan) that's supposed to slit his throat doesn't
    really want to kill him, only making the titular cut on his neck.
    Despite the fact that it's obviously a very calculated choice to have
    an Ottoman/Turk show some basic human decency and thus save an
    Armenian from becoming a victim of genocide, the two men's complex
    rapport is believably sketched in just a few scenes. (That said, the
    exact details of why the Armenians have to die remain rather vague.)

    One of the best shots in the entire film is also part of this
    sequence, as Nazaret, lying on the ground with his hands tied behind
    his back, wakes up the next morning next to the lifeless body of one
    of his co-workers. Since he's also lost his voice, apparently because
    the cut damaged his vocal cords, Nazar can't do anything but nudge his
    forehead against that of his dead fellow Armenian, a wordless gesture
    that suggests respect, compassion and desperation all at once.

    Unfortunately, the rest of the film contains only a few other moments
    that are that expressive and touching, moments that are scattered
    amidst long stretches in which Nazar is on the move and tries to
    survive but in which barely anything that happens throws some new
    light on what Nazar thinks or feels. After escaping certain death,
    Manoogian has to hide his Armenian identity from Bedouins and the
    inhabitants of Aleppo (now in Syria), where he ends up working for a
    kind soap manufacturer (Palestinian-Israeli actor Makram J. Khoury).
    When WWI ends in 1918, the Ottoman occupiers are violently chased out
    of town by the angry locals, though Nazar stops throwing stones like
    those around him when a young Turkish boy is hit.

    He is also reminded of his children when watching an open-air
    screening of Chaplin's The Kid, supposedly in 1921, right after the
    film came out. It is after the screening, with his face still wet from
    his tears, that Nazar learns that his daughters are still alive and
    the film's odyssey structure really kicks in, as the protagonist has
    to comb through Syria, Lebanon, Havana, Cuba, Florida, Minneapolis and
    even the Great Plains in search of his daughters. Unintentionally, the
    number of locales the mute father has to travel to becomes
    increasingly comical, as each time he seems to have barely missed his
    on-the-move daughters.

    Akin was clearly aiming for an epic in the David Lean/Elia Kazan mold,
    with possibly some touches of the more sweetly melodramatic side of
    Chaplin because his protagonist can't speak. But exactly because the
    main character literally loses his voice early on, the film doesn't
    allow for easy audience identification. The script, co-written by the
    director and Mardik Martin, the screenwriter of Armenian origins who
    co-wrote Scorsese's Mean Streets and Raging Bull, concentrates too
    much on Nazar's singular quest, namely surviving in order to find his
    daughters, for other happenings or characters to register much during
    the film's nonetheless almost epic, 138-minute running time.

    There's also a language problem, as all the Armenian characters speak
    accented (and occasionally clunky) English while the Ottomans, Arabs
    and Cubans all speak their own languages (all of which this poor
    artisan seems to understand without any problems). This would be an
    acceptable choice if Nazar hadn't gone to the U.S., where everyone
    also speaks English. This initially gives audiences the rather odd
    impression that all Americans were fluent in Armenian in the early
    1920s.

    Rahim has a great face but isn't given enough opportunity to make it
    clear to audiences what his character is going through beyond the most
    basic emotions, especially after Nazaret loses his faculty of speech.
    All other actors are bit players, with Moritz Bleibtreu and Trine
    Dyrholm making cameo appearances as an industrialist and Christian nun
    respectively.

    The widescreen film's globe-trotting locations and sets, handsomely
    designed by Allan Starski (Schindler's List, The Pianist), are often
    captured by cinematographer Rainer Klausmann in wide shots that take
    audiences from the desert to the Atlantic Ocean and finally to rural
    North Dakota, with especially the influence of Westerns noticeable in
    the compositions. And Akin's regular composer, Alexander Hacke, at
    least avoids falling into the trap of copying the scores of the epics
    of yesteryear, instead coming up with his own rocky, often
    electric-guitar driven compositions.

    Production companies: Bombero International, Pyramide Productions,
    Pandora Film, Corazon International, NDR, ADR Degeto, France 3 Cinema,
    Dorje Film, BIM Distribuzione, Mars Media Entertainment, Opus Film,
    Jordan Films, Anadolu Kultur

    Cast: Tahar Rahim, Simon Abkarian, Hindi Zahra, Makram J. Khoury,
    Kevork Malikyan, Trine Dyrholm, Moritz Bleibtreu, Lara Heller

    Director: Fatih Akin

    Screenplay: Fatih Akin, Mardik Martin

    Producer: Fatik Akin, Karl Baumgartner, Reinhard Brundig, Nurhan
    Sekerci-Porst, Flaminio Zadra

    Co-producers: Fabienne Vonier, Francis Boespflug, Alberto Fanni,
    Valerio De Paolis, Ruben Dishdishyan, Aram Movsesyan, Laurette
    Bourassa, Doug Steeden, Piotr Dzieciol, Ewa Puszczynska

    Director of photography: Rainer Klausmann
    Production designer: Allan Starski
    Costume designer: Katrin Aschendorf
    Editor: Andrew Bird
    Music: Alexander Hacke
    Sales: The Match Factory
    No rating, 138 minutes

    http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/cut-venice-review-729277

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