Best Intentions
by James Snapko

There are certain occasions on which I become more anxious than usual about sitting down in front of the big screen. That's because there are a handful of filmmakers that, over the years, I've come to regard as some of the most effective, brilliant, and artful at their craft, and when they release a new film, I'm there. Atom Egoyan is one of those filmmakers. The Canadian auteur's new film Ararat deals with characters consumed by loss, searching for the missing pieces in their lives, and craving for some kind of resolution to their pain. I had every intention of walking into the theater, sitting down, and getting sucked into the Armenian-born director's latest effort. I just knew I was going to love this film. Sure enough, as I sat there, I noticed most of the cinematic and thematic elements in place that worked in Egoyan's previous three films (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Felicia's Journey). But when it ended, something was wrong...I didn't love it.

There are moments in Ararat that have a deep visceral effect, in part because of the traumatic content and in part due to Egoyan's masterful direction, but as the film played I began to pick up on two undesirable by-products of his solemn approach to the material that have been absent since his earlier films: melodrama and (dare I say it) pretension. Egoyan has decided to tackle a heavy subject - the genocide of the Armenian people in Turkey during WWI. Now, if you are familiar with Egoyan's films, you know they are all very serious, and he never comes at the material straight on. His films are elliptical, dreamlike, and always complicated. He interweaves multiple characters that are, to varying degrees, inexorably linked together. In addition, the storylines intersect around one larger thematic structure.

The story concerns Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), an art history professor, whose book detailing Armenian painter Arshile Gorky's life gives her the opportunity to be a consultant to Rouben (Eric Bogosian), a screenwriter working for Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), an aging Armenian-born filmmaker who is making a film about the Armenian genocide in 1915 (Gorky was one of the survivors of the genocide). Ani's son Raffi (David Alpay) works as a production assistant on the film. He is caught between his devotion to his mother's plight (promoting the Gorky book), his love for his stepsister Celia (Marie-Josee Croze), and his own need to seek out his heritage. Raffi goes to Armenia to see the ruins of his ancestors in an attempt to make sense out of who he is. On his way back home he is confronted by a diligent inspections officer (Christopher Plummer) who questions Raffi about the film cans he's trying to bring back into the country (the cans supposedly contain footage for the film he's working on).

The connection in this convoluted web is in how the characters process their histories in order to resolve an emotional void. But the real question becomes whether or not the audience can identify with what the characters are engaged in. In the context of what is going on in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel), Egoyan claims the film is timely: "I'm so excited about the film coming out right now. In dealing with any sort of tyranny or terror -- it's about denying someone else's humanity, being able to abstract. To commit any sort of violence, you need to be able to do that, to assume that other person doesn't have a right to exist. So right now, the film can make people understand that there are other histories, other perspectives, that you cannot abstract." (Quoted from PopMatters.com.)

While I see a relevant connection to the cultural wars being waged around the world, the inherently incestuous nature of cultural and ethnic identities, and the abstraction of those identities (embodied in the Turkey/Armenia land sharing and the Celia/Raffi relationship) that is addressed in this film, I'm not so convinced this film engages the audience at that level. I want a challenging film that makes me think, but Egoyan has coded his messages in the narrative beyond what may have been necessary, complicating the scenario by positioning the characters at odds to one another as a kind of index to the cultural and ethnic tensions I've mentioned, and by presenting us with so many characters that have their own needs for resolution.

There are a lot of emotions to be hammered out in this film. Each of the characters' intentions for his or her actions is different. Raffi wants to find a missing piece of himself. He goes to Armenia in order to resolve some of his inner turmoil. This leads to his interrogation at the customs office because he may or may not be smuggling heroin in to the country. Celia sleeps with Raffi as a way of getting at Ani. She believes her father's suicide is a result of Ani's infidelity while she was married to her father. Ani wants to promote her book to help illuminate a great painter's work, and in order to define a significant part of social history that has been ignored (Turkey denies the genocide ever happened). But she cannot easily dismiss Celia's accusations or the constant interruptions during her lectures. The screenwriter wants a blockbuster, so he takes "poetic license" and changes the script to suit his needs. The director, on the other hand, has direct ties to the event depicted in the film, so he tells a "personal" version of that history. The customs officer wants Raffi to admit his guilt, but as his interview with Raffi becomes drawn out, it becomes clearer that he wants to forgive Raffi for his possible transgression as a way of reconciling his feelings toward his gay son.

This summary should give you an idea of why this film has trouble communicating what it wants to the audience. Typically, Egoyan's style is his strong suit, but here it becomes an arduous exercise. The nonlinear quality of the story, while interesting at times, creates a distance between the movie and viewer. We never become engaged directly with the substance of this film because Egoyan's methods are too difficult to digest. Normally, his style opens up the potential for the film to create deeper meaning, particularly in Egoyan's adroit use of editing. The time-shifting scheme allows for potent symbolism in the cuts. To his credit, those elements are present to an extent, but the end result of those technical elements just doesn't work out the way I feel he intended. In a way, it feels like the material traps Egoyan. He wants the audience to be informed about a catastrophic event (the Armenian genocide) while at the same time he's trying to tell multiple stories that somehow connect to the Armenian massacre that is influenced through his subjective style. An example of style and substance conflicting is seen in the re-creations of the genocide: we are caught in a strange balance, somewhere between the horror of those images and the cool distance created by the style. The actions depicted are horrifying (murder, rape), but the depiction is not. Egoyan's elegance is not suited to portray brutality to that degree.

Another of Egoyan's typical strengths becomes a hindrance; he's an intellectual presenting his subjects through the lens of an intellectual. His previous three films did not work this way (not to his disadvantage anyway), but in Ararat, everything is on a cerebral level. Sometimes he explores the unconscious and how characters process trauma internally. This is challenging stuff, and sometimes he succeeds, but his willingness to delve into the psyche plays to his detriment because we never feel close to the tragedy, the characters, or the identity issues, due to the academic presentation. Everything is kept at a distance, and unfortunately the film begins to take on a pretentious quality. That pretension is compounded by some of the melodramatic performances. While I see great depth and emotion in the work of Plummer and Khanjian, David Alpay, as Raffi, gives a stilted, sometimes mawkish performance that amplifies the film's melodramatic tone. There is other noticeably awkward work from Bogosian, and Brent Carver as the customs inspector's son..

Ararat is not a total failure. There are some brief, engrossing moments that are fueled by Egoyan's obvious passion about the subject and his command of the medium. Just as Edward Saroyan is making a film-within-the-film that is close to his heart, Egoyan is working his way through some of the same emotions. Without question, this is his most personal film. It is also the reason for the film's paradox. Egoyan's intentions are honorable, but he finds himself caught between telling a tragic story that may be impossible to tell and still communicate its gravity, and presenting a stylized examination about how we come to know ourselves.

©2002 James Snapko
CineScene