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The Cut review: Fatih Akin's Armenian genocide epic draws blood

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  • The Cut review: Fatih Akin's Armenian genocide epic draws blood

    The Cut review: Fatih Akin's Armenian genocide epic draws blood

    Tahar Rahim is a mute father searching for his children in the
    aftermath of a conflict cinema has tended to neglect. His story is
    compassionately handled, but the film lacks the subtlety of Akin's
    earlier, non-English language work

    Peter Bradshaw in Venice

    theguardian.com, Sunday 31 August 2014 12.10 BST

    Echoes of Pasolini's Christ in the Gospel According To St Matthew ...
    Rahim with daughters in The Cut.Photograph: Indiewire

    "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
    asked Adolf Hitler, and this mass murder in 1915 by the Ottomans of
    the minority Armenian population is still a hugely controversial
    subject, especially in Turkey where there is resistance to assuming a
    retrospective burden of genocidal shame. Fatih Akin, the
    German-Turkish film-maker, has made it the starting-point for a
    heartfelt, if soapy Zhivago-ish quest epic, his first English-language
    movie; he directs, produces and co-writes with Mardik Martin, the
    veteran screenwriter who worked with Scorsese on Raging Bull and Mean
    Streets.

    It's a big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work, concerned to
    show the Armenian horror was absorbed into the bloodstream of
    immigrant-descended population in the United States, but it is a
    little simplistic emotionally, especially in its latter half as the
    film trudges across America with its hero. It doesn't have the
    sophisticated nuance and wit of Akin's contemporary German-language
    movies, like Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007).

    A still from The Cut Photograph: Indiewire

    This horrifying historical episode is neglected in the cinema --
    although Atom Egoyan addressed it in his 2002 film Ararat; Akin takes
    it on in good faith, although Armenian communities may take exception
    to the fact that he actually dramatises, on screen, the brutal deaths
    of 30 or so victims. The part can stand for the whole of course, but
    the total numbers involved are not specified.

    Tahar Rahim plays the embattled hero Nazareth, a blacksmith and
    Armenian Christian who is torn from his wife and twin daughters by the
    Ottoman authorities for a supposed military conscription which is
    nothing more than slave labour on a work gang and a forced march
    heading to racial annihilation. But he encounters decent Turks: a
    civilian prisoner who pretends to cut his throat at the orders of a
    soldier, but merely stabs him in the neck, leaving Nazareth alive but
    mute. Nazareth scrambles away, an undead fugitive from history: a crew
    of Turkish army deserters help him with food and water.

    He is finally taken in by a soap manufacturer: the ambiguous metaphor
    is there if we want it -- the soap which genuinely cleanses, or merely
    something with which powerful people will wash their hands of
    responsibility. The manufacturer attempts to give some of his wares to
    soldiers, and calls after them: "The whores of Aleppo will thank you!"
    Poor, mute Nazareth becomes obsessed with one thing: finding his
    daughters, now young women, a mission which will take him on a journey
    of thousands of miles.

    A still from The Cut Photograph: PR

    It is this journey which is frankly the film's weaker aspect. There is
    little historical or political contention in it, and not much actual
    drama; the horror itself recedes in the memory to be replaced by a
    long search and a long haul, with disappointments verging on the
    farcical, in the course of which Rahim's character does not grow or
    change that much. He remains pretty boyish-looking, despite some grey
    hairs at the end. (At the beginning of the movie, in fact, he has a
    look of Pasolini's Christ in the Gospel According To St Matthew.) And
    he is mute, of course, which means that there is not much in the
    script for Tahar Rahim to work with, and he gives what amounts to a
    very subdued performance although interestingly one moment when he
    does comes alive is in his entranced reaction to a silent movie show:
    Chaplin in The Kid. Nazareth's eyes light up like a child's.

    But otherwise the movie is not much leavened with comedy or happiness.
    It's understandable. The Cut can mean the brutal act of murder itself;
    it can mean the division of husbands from wives, parents from
    children, and it can mean the present from the past, the insidious
    amputation of memory. Whether The Cut encompasses this last sense is
    up for debate, but it is a forceful, watchable, strongly presented
    picture and a courageous, honest gesture from Fatih Akin.

    http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/31/the-cut-review-fatih-akins-armenian-genocide-epic-draws-blood

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