War, Remembrance

Atom Egoyan's Ararat, just recently released on DVD, is a meditation on the legacy of Turkey's slaughter of its Armenian citizenry in 1915, the first atrocity of the century and the inspiration for the word "genocide." It's also a film about film's inability to adequately convey the gravity of history, which makes it something of a puzzle. Encased within Egoyan's multilayered dispassion play, perhaps the most perfectly meta work ever filmed (made all the more so because of the director's commentary track), are four tightly interconnected stories, spanning the last century, two continents, and every mode of historical and personal consciousness imaginable. For a historical epic, Ararat is remarkably obtuse, and stridently intellectual. It's also deeply moving, and easily the most fascinating work of the Canadian director's career.

At the heart of the picture is the question of who has the moral authority to tell this story. We meet Ani, a contemporary Armenian Canadian scholar (Arsinée Khanjian) who tells the story of Armenian painter and genocide survivor Arshile Gorky, whom we see represented both in "reality" and in the film-within-the-film for which Ani has been hired as a historical consultant. As Ani struggles to justify the film's factual liberties, her son Raffi (David Alpay) struggles to reconcile the meaning of the life and death of his father, an Armenian who was killed attempting to assassinate a Turkish diplomat.

Into this already potent mixture, Egoyan throws a director (Charles Aznavour), a screenwriter (Eric Bogosian), a customs agent (Christopher Plummer), an actor (Bruce Greenwood), and several other tangential figures, each of them tied to the central question. The characters are beset with the burden of history while the film's ingenious structure pulls their disparate, often contradictory circumstances ever closer together. By film's end, Gorky's studio, a Hollywood backlot, modern-day Toronto, and the bloody hills of Van, Turkey, are inextricably linked. The common thread is not genocide, but the urgent need to relay a long-suppressed truth.

Ararat's sprawling narrative comes together most stirringly in a single speech, delivered by Greenwood when Ani storms the set of the film-within-the-film, in a fit of conscience over its fast-and-loose interpretations. In character twice over as an actor playing an American missionary eyewitness to the genocide, Greenwood explodes into a monologue, delivered by the missionary, about the severity of the situation. Bent over the bloody body of a dying boy, the actor-doctor describes the horror of the slaughter as if it were actually happening; the extras suddenly seem like real victims, the set a crucible of reality, and the scholar an obstacle to the truth. "The crowd needs a miracle," Greenwood says. "Who the hell are you?"