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Belated History: Revisiting Atom Egoyan's "Ararat"

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  • Belated History: Revisiting Atom Egoyan's "Ararat"

    Belated History: Revisiting Atom Egoyan's "Ararat"
    By Hovig Tchalian

    Critics' Forum Article, 04.01.06

    Critics' Forum
    Film and Music

    It may seem unusual to review a film released almost four
    years ago. But as we enter the first year of the tenth decade of
    commemorating the Armenian Genocide, Atom Egoyan's "Ararat" (2002)
    presents an ideal opportunity to do so in the context of the film's
    central theme, the uncanny act of remembering~Wagain.

    "Ararat" is a powerful, reverent and unquestionably personal look
    at the ravages of the Genocide, both immediate and more distant. But
    the film as a whole is also deeply flawed, precisely because of its
    personal nature.

    Like Egoyan's other films, the premise of "Ararat" is complex and
    multi-layered. It revolves ostensibly around the making of a film
    about the Genocide by Edward Saroyan (played by Charles Aznavour),
    a well-known director now well past his prime. In typical Egoyan
    fashion, the stories of the other characters weave themselves into
    the central story of the making of Saroyan's film: Raffi, the main
    character (played credibly by David Alpay), is in love with his
    step- sister, Celia; she is locked in struggle with her mother, Ani
    (played by Egoyan's wife, Arsinée Khanjian); Ani is an art historian
    interested in Arshile Gorky (played movingly by Simon Abkarian) and
    his representation of himself and his mother, which Celia accuses her
    of using as a way of coming to terms with the death (or, according to
    Celia, her murder) of her second husband, Celia's father; the film's
    producer, Rouben (played by Eric Bogosian), hires Ani as a consultant,
    in order to help add elements of Gorky's biography as a plotline in
    the film.

    The stories converge on Raffi's attempt to bring (or perhaps sneak)
    several rolls of film into the United States that he claims to have
    shot in Anatolia (present-day Eastern Turkey, historically Western
    Armenia) for use in the production. An aging customs officer, David
    (played ably by Christopher Plummer), is the only person who stands
    in his way. David is himself close to retirement and having trouble
    adjusting to his divorced son's relationship with his half-Turkish
    gay lover (played by Elias Koteas), an actor who winds up playing
    the part of the main Turkish antagonist in Saroyan's film, Jevdet Bey.

    As is clear from the extended synopsis above, the various elements
    of the film make for a complex storyline. Though it can be argued
    that some of the details are "wasted" here (other, better films, of
    Egoyan's are far more "efficient" and less heavy-handed), there is
    still a clear purpose to them. For instance, the twin details of the
    director's waning talents~Wa fact mentioned off-handedly by Raffi~W
    and the customs officer's impending retirement~Wrevealed slowly
    throughout~Ware subtle but significant. Together, they represent
    the film's central concern, what we might call the "latency" or
    "belatedness" of history~Win other words, the difficulty of proving
    after the fact an event that took place in the past. We understand
    that the Genocide narrative in the imaginary film is told too late
    to change the facts but, equally, struggling even to transmit them
    meaningfully to posterity. Like its director, the film is tragically
    past its prime. The same may be said of any attempt to capture the
    full weight of history, a fact that Egoyan (as a director of the film
    that tells its own, similar story) recognizes all too well.

    The two aging characters and the structure of the film-within-a-film
    repeat themselves across a host of other dualities: we find out
    that Ani has been married twice, first to Raffi's father, who was
    killed in an attempt to assassinate a Turkish diplomat, and second
    to Celia's father, who apparently (and like Gorky) committed suicide;
    we discover that Raffi is actually sneaking two sets of films across
    the border, one set of rolls (that may in fact contain Heroin) given
    to him by the Turkish soldier who helped him get into view of Ararat
    and a roll of film that he took on his own camcorder that includes
    a shot of the Madonna and child in Aghtamar that mirrors Gorky's
    painting; we are also told that Gorky painted that image in 1934,
    as a way of coming to terms with the killing of his mother in 1915
    (an act that Ani is trying to uncover and understand in the present).

    Such parallels, sometimes subtle and sometimes less so, all build on
    the idea of belatedness. They do not represent dualities so much as
    an almost endless string of repetitions and revisions, of strange but
    hopeful attempts, as I suggested earlier, to remember~Wagain. By the
    end of the film, the sheer number and dizzying array of motifs in
    the film come perilously close to overwhelming its subject as well
    as its viewer.

    A surprisingly effective repetition in the film is the one that
    involves Ali, who plays the part of the Turkish official, Jevdet
    Bey, in Saroyan's film. He is a half-Turkish American citizen who
    reveals during the course of filming that he has trouble believing
    that the Genocide was ever more than a civil disturbance and those
    killed much more than casualties of war. Raffi's futile attempt to
    convince him otherwise is more than an act of will. His all-too-
    human response of confronting a Genocide denier~Win the person of
    Ali~W becomes at the same time a heroic attempt to reach back into
    and reverse history itself~Win the person of Jevdet Bey. History and
    art collide in Raffi's personal encounter with collective memory and
    the reconstruction of historical experience.

    The personal nature of Raffi's encounter ensures the emotional and
    artistic integrity of the film, its heart and soul. But surprisingly,
    it also represents the film's undoing. The delicate balance between
    art and tragedy represented in Raffi's experience begins to unravel
    as we extend it to include Egoyan's own experience of making a quite
    personal film about the Genocide. From this broader perspective, the
    film is unable to navigate the fine line between art and historical
    commentary. In that sense, the complex associations among the film's
    various elements must be seen as a heroic but doomed attempt to capture
    the fullness of the Genocide and its implications, both personal and
    collective. To put it differently, the film puts forward the idea that
    a historical event is infinitely complex, all the while attempting
    to shed light on what actually happened. Not surprisingly, reviews
    of the film have described it either as "slanted" or "committed,"
    a distinction that even a filmmaker of Egoyan's talents would be
    hard-pressed to overcome.

    As mentioned earlier, the film's complex plot converges on Raffi's
    attempt to sneak the rolls of film out of Turkey and into the States,
    and in the film's rationale, into the light of day. The customs
    officer, David, suspects that the roll given to Raffi by the soldier
    contains drugs. David explains that many of those who ingest those
    drugs to sneak them past the officers, when confronted with the crime,
    get so nervous that the packets explode in their system, causing an
    immediate overdose. The conversation parallels the very first scene
    in the film, in which Aznavour's character, Saroyan, tries to get a
    pomegranate ("nour") past customs. (It also parallels the imagined
    story in Saroyan's film, in which Gorky fails in his attempt to get
    a letter about the Turkish siege on Van to the American authorities
    and is caught by Jevdet Bey.) When David refuses to allow Saroyan to
    bring the fruit across the border, Saroyan ingests the seeds instead,
    explaining that he expects them to bring him luck. (We find out later
    that his mother, a deportee, had a single pomegranate with her on
    her journey and survived by ingesting a seed a day and considering
    it a full meal.) The most obvious parallel in all these cases is to
    the truth at the heart of the Genocide, which starts as a letter of
    distress in Saroyan's film and becomes, in Egoyan's, both pomegranate
    seed and packet of heroin, sustaining to those who would give it life
    and a potentially explosive issue to those intent on suppressing it.

    The film's resolution, if there is one, comes in the form of Raffi's
    liberation. David releases him from customs, accepting the various
    lies he has told as a way of getting at the truth, of imagining its
    possibility. This act in turn leads to David's acceptance of his
    son and sets everything that has come before it awash in the light
    of hope. It is reminiscent of perhaps the single most affecting
    moment in the film, in which Gorky, struggling to paint his mother's
    portrait, gives himself over to the music playing on his phonograph
    and dances to it, palette and paintbrush in hand. Egoyan has earlier
    shown us captive Armenian women made to dance by Turkish soldiers,
    a scene that transforms Gorky's, by contrast, into the ultimate act
    of imagination and hope, a dance on the grave of history itself.

    The film's final scene is of Gorky's mother sewing a button back onto
    her son's jacket. The button is missing in Gorky's famous portrait
    but hidden from view, covered over by a flower his mother gives him
    to hold over it just before the photograph is taken. The humble act
    of sewing it back on stands in for the far more difficult goal of
    setting history right, after the fact. It presents the film's hopeful
    answer to the problems posed by history's belatedness.

    "Ararat" is not Atom Egoyan's finest film. That distinction belongs
    to "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997), a simple, graceful and ultimately
    more powerful meditation on the effects of a school bus crash on the
    residents of a Midwestern town. The earlier film does not try as hard
    to confront the full impact of its tragedy, though one admittedly
    smaller in scope. Paradoxically, Egoyan's personal feelings about the
    events depicted in "Ararat" render it a painfully personal attempt to
    address an unresolved historical tragedy in all its complexity. But
    it is worth revisiting, if only to confront the immensity and hope
    of the enterprise.

    All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2006

    Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
    edited several journals and also published articles of his own.

    You can reach him or any of the other contributors to Critics' Forum
    at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
    in this series are available online at www.criticsforum.org. To
    sign up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
    www.criticsforum.org/join. Critics' Forum is a group created to
    discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.

    --Boundary_(ID_B83jdvBDXp7QA75LyKLGPQ)- -
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