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Venice 2014: 'The Cut' review

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  • Venice 2014: 'The Cut' review

    CineVue
    Aug 31 2014


    Venice 2014: 'The Cut' review

    `...`...`...`?`?

    Medz Yeghern is the synonym Armenians gave to the brutal extermination
    of their people by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to the end of First
    World War, which also gave a new word to the English language -
    'genocide', coined by Raphael Lemkin. Also known as the Armenian
    Holocaust, the state-sponsored murders were widely seen as
    foreshadowing the modern techniques of murder that would be brought to
    terrible perfection by the Nazis during the Second World War.
    Turkish-German director Fatih Akin has chosen this catastrophic event
    for his new epic film, The Cut (2014), which screened in competition
    at the 71st Venice Film Festival and tells the tale of a father's
    search for his family.

    Nazaret Manoogian (a superb Tahar Rahim) is a simple blacksmith in a
    small town called Mardin, where he lives with his wife Rakel (Hindi
    Zahra) and twin daughters Lucinée and Arsinée (Dina and Zein
    Fakhoury). All is well until the fateful day that soldiers come
    knocking on the door. Nazaret finds himself part of a road gang, a
    prisoner working with other Armenians. They hear tales of
    extermination and witness a death march, even as their comrades drop
    dead from overwork and neglect beside them. One morning, the men are
    tied up and marched into a canyon where they're all to be executed by
    a posse of prisoners and bandits. This scene is played out in its full
    horror, but Nazaret is spared when a thief, Mehmet (Bartu
    Küçükçaglayan), makes the non-fatal incision of the the film's title.

    Aided by his saviour, Nazaret looks only to survive at first,
    surrounded everywhere by potential enemies and now, because of his
    partly slit throat, unable to speak. He happens across a camp of the
    dead and dying, where he meets his sister-in-law who tells him that
    his family are all dead. Later, he will find refuge in a soap factory.
    This first half of the film is by far the most successful. Akin is
    obviously influenced by David Lean, not only in the grandeur of the
    spaces and the sweep of the narrative but also in his choice to make
    scenes of death and murder not the documentary-style cinema vérité of
    sequences in Spielberg' Schindler's List (1993), but pointedly and
    cinematically beautiful. The death camp resembles an oil painting and
    a well filled with dead bodies is a striking, Bruegel-like image.

    There are some weaknesses as Akin's unquestionably good intentions sit
    too nakedly on the screen: the stilted idyll of Nazaret's home life
    for instance and the goodness of Arab soap maker Omar (Makram Khoury)
    who rescues him in Aleppo. The biggest problem is the decision to have
    the Armenian characters all speak English. This is just about
    manageable in the first half but on learning his daughters are still
    alive, Nazaret goes on what can only be described as a globe-trotting
    search for them. Again, Akin's laudable intention is certainly to have
    the film seen by as wide an audience as possible, and few criticised
    Schindler's List for not being in German and Polish, but when Nazaret
    arrives in America one wonders whether he can understand the English
    because it's basically Armenian or what.

    Although The Cut's second half is supposed to represent the diaspora
    that succeeded the genocide, it has the effect of making the narrative
    appear almost random as Nazaret is sent from pillar to post and his
    emotions, now expressed only through gestures and written notes, are
    narrowed down to hopes and dashed hopes. A well-behaved and
    unashamedly populist film, the kind that could be shown in schools and
    community centres, Akin's The Cut remains an undeniably important film
    regardless. What it does extremely well is to movingly illustrate a
    terrible moment in history which has been sadly neglected in the West
    and actively suppressed in other parts of the world.

    The 71st Venice Film Festival takes place from 27 August to 6
    September 2014. For more coverage, follow this link.


    John Bleasdale
    http://www.cine-vue.com/2014/08/venice-2014-cut-review.html

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