Ararat (Atom Egoyan, 2002)

 

Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is fairly typical of the director’s post-peak works: meticulously controlled, preoccupied with weighty themes, its structural intricacy spanning the public and the intimate; and, sadly, almost completely lacking in impact. The film concerns itself with the 1915 Armenian genocide, both as a valid subject for modern-day film-making (Charles Aznavour plays a director making a film called Ararat) and as a continuing source of preoccupation and trauma, both directly (Egoyan lumberingly contrives a reason for a customs officer to be discussing the history at length with a suspected drug smuggler) and by generational and cultural proximity (that same suspect’s father, an Armenian activist, was shot dead while attempting to kill a Turkish diplomat). The film’s thicket of interconnections (for example, the custom’s officer’s son is in a relationship with an actor in the movie, on which the suspect also works as a production assistant), seemingly intended to establish a sense of layered complexity, mostly feels over-determined and airless: the film lacks any hint of spontaneity or true discovery, its artifices and inventions at odds with any possibility of more than superficial empathy. It does evoke a nagging suspicion (or maybe it’s just a faintly benevolent hope) that Egoyan is playing a particularly sophisticated game (for example, why should we believe that a flashback seemingly showing the truth about a past death is any more reliable than the material we see being shot in a studio), that the earnestness and speechifying are parodic, mocking the whole notion that commercial cinema could possibly make a meaningful contribution to historical memory and understanding. But the weight of evidence indicates that the film is indeed as turgidly self-important as one experiences it as being. The actors are at best dull and poorly utilized (Marie-Josee Croze is one of the few centres of energy), and at worst (Elias Koteas is a prime offender) barely watchable.