Ararat

Ararat

Atom Egoyan has a message for us. According to his new film “Ararat,” in 1915 Turkey committed genocide against its Armenian population, killing of two-thirds of the country’s 1.5 million people of Armenian heritage. This crime still denied by the Turks has all but disappeared from history.

Egoyan is one of Canada’s finest and most respected filmmakers; he and his wife, actress Arsinee Khanjian, are Canadian Armenians. When he told his children about the killings, he said in an interview, they asked if Turkey had ever apologized. His answer is contained in “Ararat.” But it is shrouded within such a willfully obscure film that most viewers will leave the theater impressed not by the movie’s difficulty but by the fact that they couldn’t understand what was going on.

In fact, though Egoyan often moves elegantly among different levels of reality and shifting points of view, here he has constructed a film so labyrinthine that it defeats itself.

The story involves three main strands: (1) A movie is being made about the atrocity; (2) some scenes in this film-within-a-film re-create historical events, for our information; (3) there are connections between the people working on the movie and other characters in the story.

We meet an art historian named Ani (Khanjian), who lectures on Arshile Gorky, an Armenian artist whose mother was killed in Turkey during World War I. Ani’s husband died 15 years earlier while trying to assassinate a Turkish official; she has a son named Raffi (David Alpay) from her first marriage and a stepdaughter named Celia (Marie-Josee Croze) from her second marriage to a man whom Celia believes was driven to suicide by Ani. When Ani gives her talk on Gorky, Celia often comes to heckle her with questions about her dead father. Further complicating this emotional morass, Raffi and Celia are sleeping together.

There is another sexual-political connection. When Raffi tries to pass through a Canadian customs post with several film cans from Europe, he is interrogated at length by a customs officer named David (Christopher Plummer), who is on his last day of work before retirement. Raffi says the cans contain undeveloped documentary footage needed for the movie. We know, from a scene at breakfast that day, that Plummer’s son Philip (Brent Carver) is the lover of an actor named Ali (Elias Koteas), who plays the barbaric Turkish general Jevdet Bey in the film. Thus David knows that the movie being brought in by Raffi may not be required for the project.

We meet Edward (Charles Aznavour), the director of the film, and see him on set, shooting scenes that are sometimes presented as reality until the camera pulls back to reveal another camera. And we meet Rouben (Eric Bogosian), the screenwriter. Both Aznavour and Bogosian are used they’re of Armenian descent to convey more information about the atrocities; so is Clarence Ussher (Bruce Greenwood), a character in Aznavour’s movie and actual American physician who witnessed the killings and wrote a book about them.

The customs questioning drags on, seemingly, for hours because David is trying to work out whether the cans contain film or heroin. He could open them (in a darkroom, so as not to ruin the film), but that would be too easy; perhaps by understanding the young man before him he can understand his own son better.

In a movie within the movie, scenes document awfulness by Turks against Armenians and one sequence shows women being burned alive. It also shows Gorky as a little boy with a rifle against the Turks; has flashbacks of Gorky painting in exile in New York as an adult; and discusses relative truth of two portraits a photo of Gorky with his mother and the painting he’s based on it. The same painting we heard Ani lecturing about.

You may now be nursing some impatience with this plot’s complexity. Too much, too many layers, needlessly difficult, opaque. Individual scenes leap out and have lives of their own; Khanjian makes the difficulties of her character very affecting; Plummer’s episode is a small perfect character study, and I remember atrocities re-created as if from another film which indeed they are.

“Ararat” comes clearly from Egoyan’s heart; he wants urgently to convey that the world should recognize and be ashamed that his people were victims of a great crime. What I receive from the movie, though, is something else: It is hard to know what happened in history, hard to know what even happens next door.

All reports depend upon where you stand between witness and recorder. That second message is conveyed by the film but I don’t think it states Egoyan’s intention. Maybe this picture was too close to him ever to get in focus maybe he was too close to see it straight himself maybe he just didn’ t want us anymore maybe when we came.

Note: In the film, Adolf Hitler is quoted discussing his plans for genocide and asking, “Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?” The film presents this as fact, but there is great controversy whether Hitler ever said it.

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