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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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Can there be more than one genocide? Writer/director Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) would have the audience know of the genocide of a million Armenians by the Turks. This conflict was an age-old one that peaked about 1917 in the general locale of Mount Ararat. In telling the story of the genocide, Egoyan has side stories (re: Robert Altman) with characters that interweave with each other. There is Raffi (David Alpay), a young man who sleeps with his stepsister (Marie-Josee Croze), who is disliked by Raffi's art historian mother (Arsinee Khanjian). The stepsister has a vendetta against the stepmother because of the death of her father. Then, there are the actors (Elias Koteas and Bruce Greenwood) making a film about the genocide by director Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour). Raffi works as a gofer on the set. Last, there is the customs official (Christopher Plummer) who begins to question Raffi when he tries to enter the U.S. Plummer's character senses a problem here, but then we see the problem in the custom official's own life with his family. The man problem with Ararat is that instead of letting the subtlety of various characters on the fringes of the genocide story work, Egoyan can't resist hammering the genocide home to the audience. Not only are there the visual scenes of disaster but monologues of explanation, as well. We know what is happening, and in this case, less would be more. With Michael Danna's emotional score at crucial moments, the audience may feel as though it is in a classroom instead of a movie theater. In Antwone Fisher, Danna has a quietly effective score but lets loose here. Not only that, but whenever the art historian appears, the audience listens to an art lecture first and then her interaction with people. The story goes back and forth from 1917, and the actors in the film, to present day. At times, audience members just aren't sure where they are. Actually, the story is based on the memoirs of an American doctor, Ussher, who headed a medical facility in Armenia at the time. There are scenes of war violence and some implied off-camera that are harrowing. The idea of watching a film being shot is good and Elias Koteas as a bitter Commandant is effective. Christopher Plummer doesn't show much emotion on his face as the customs inspector, but he doesn't have to. His voice--and this shows a master actor at work--does it all. David Alpay as Raffi closely resembles Elijah Wood, with a shock of dark curly hair and luminous eyes. One senses the intensity of his character through those eyes. Though he tells a good tale in Ararat, director Atom Egoyan does not have a satisfactory ending for the film. It's like letting just one shoe drop and we think, "What now?" One of the inside jokes here is that in filming the movie-within-a-movie, Mount Ararat is not visible from this particular area of the country, yet the film artists painted the mountain in the background anyway. "Poetic license," they say to the art historian who objects. Copyright 2002 Marie Asner
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