Ararat (August 28/02)

Ararat, the latest film from Canadian director Atom Egoyan, is clearly his most personal to date but it's also his most flawed. Supposedly Egoyan wanted to film a historical epic detailing the 1915 genocide of Armenian citizens by Turkish rulers, but couldn't raise enough money for such an extravagant production. He's instead created a picture that deals with the same themes, but on a much smaller scale. And though he's written the script, the material feels as though it would have been better served had it not been saddled with Egoyan's directorial idiosyncrasies.

Charles Aznavour stars as Edward, a prominent (and presumably Canadian) director who's about to start filming a movie based on the Armenian genocide. He's enlisted the help of Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), an Armenian historian with detailed knowledge regarding a famous painter who was a small boy during the atrocities. Ani's son, Raffi (David Alpay), has never felt compelled to research his background until now, and is returning from a Turkish trip armed with footage (in videotape and celluloid form). At the Canadian border, he has a run in with a customs officer named David (Christopher Plummer), who evidently has nothing but free time on his hands and insists that Raffi explain the whole Armenian conflict to him. All the while, clips from Edward's finished film play, and we see the situation play out first hand.

Ararat is clearly Egoyan's most personal film to date, since his background is Armenian (as is his wife's). That intense familiarity both works for and against the movie. His screenplay covers a lot of ground, from the faux footage of the conflict to the strained relationship between a mother and son. But with a subject matter like this, it seems as though the film would have been better served had Egoyan put aside his usual tendencies. The structure of the movie is the usual patchwork of past and present we've come to expect from him, but it's never seemed quite as uneven as it does here. On the one hand, the historical stuff is fascinating (and is good enough to wish that Egoyan had been able to secure funding to film an entire movie like that), but the sequences featuring Raffi explaining the conflict to David feels more like a history lesson than anything else.

And that's really the problem here. The tone of the movie is so uneven - it lurches from cynicism to didacticism - that it never becomes the classic Egoyan clearly wants it to be. Still, there aren't exactly a ton of movies on this subject and he has assembled an amazing cast, so the film is certainly worth checking out.