Movie Reviews

Ararat is the first film I've seen from the (semi) famous Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Based on the quality of this film, though, I'm certainly going to check out his earlier work.

Ararat is probably one of the smartest films I've seen this year, yet almost in spite of its cleverness, it manages to be deeply heart-felt and moving. The main subject of the film is the apparent genocide commited by the Turks against the people of Armenia during the First World War. To this day, Armenians insist that their families were systematically slaughtered by the Turks, who were supposed to be their protectors, whereas some Turks believe that what occured was only the result of a necessary war against the Armenians to prevent them from turning and siding with the Russians. The fact that this sort of thing is almost never heard about in modern film is Ararat's first strength.

The second -- and largest -- strength comes from the brilliant way in which the story is presented. The setting is modern-day Toronto, where a famous fictitious director and his crew are filming a period-piece epic about the Armenian slaughter (Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood plays one of the stars in this film-within-the film). We do get to see a fair share of this internal film, and in its own right, it's a daring and wonderfully made film that would be worth seeing in its entirety, if it actually existed. What Atom Egoyan does with Ararat, though, is even more daring. Egoyan uses the film-within-the-film for two purposes: first, it allows him to explain to us modern viewers what actually happened in Armenia during World War One, by way of, for example, script-discussions that occur on the set. Second, it allows him to vividly illustrate the tensions that still exist between Armenians and Turks.

This second aspect is accomplished through the many fully-developed characters that fill out Ararat. For instance, one of the lead actors of the internal film is of Turkish decent, and one of the set's stage managers (who's also more-or-less the main character in Ararat) is an Armenian. Tensions develop when the Turkish actor, after researching his role as a Turkish general during the fighting, begins to question whether the Armenian genocide actually happened and leans toward believing that it may have been a "necessary" action.

I could continue by trying to explain the many other side-stories and characters in this film, but I think I'll just stop here. There is plenty of other stuff happening though, but it's all handled exceptionally well, with any possible confusion kept to a minimum (thankfully without "dumbing down" to the audience to provide easy answers).

Ararat is an exceptionally-written, well-acted, and beautifully-made film. It's also one of those films that likely won't be seen by too many people for some reason or another... and that's really unfortunate.