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Ararat [2003] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

Starring: David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver, Marie-Josée Croze
Director: Atom Egoyan
Format: Closed-captioned Colour Dolby DVD-Video NTSC Widescreen
Released: 22 Jul 2003
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Emotional and totally engaging - By: Richard, 07 Oct 2006
Unlike some reviewers I was completely drawn into the beautifully crafted movie. By describing the events in 1915 through contemporary characters who continue to be deeply affected by them, we can also feel their emotional upheavals. How can man be so cruel to man, why are the atrocities still denied by Turks, what could have been the reasons for so much hate, why are the excuses still put forward? The cinematic canvas is completed by recreations of the historical events in the 'film within the film', & the personal conflicts between the modern characters which have different levels of connection with the fate of Armenians in Turkey & their history. The film needs & deserves viewers who like to concentrate & have their own emotions stirred. Excellent acting & some beautiful photography - a delicious five-course meal of a film.
Gave me a headache - By: Joseph Haschka, 17 Feb 2006
ARARAT is a sincere attempt on the part of the film's creators to acquaint the audience with the horrors of the genocide delivered by the Turkish government upon its Christian Armenian citizens during the First World War, & which resulted in the deaths of over a million, or about two-thirds of the Armenian population. The screenwriter tried to tell the story in an imaginative way. Unfortunately, the screenplay came out too clever to the point of being a boondoggle, & I came away disappointed & with a headache. Four different timelines & several subplots converge into such a mess that it'll be difficult to write a lucid synopsis.

Gosh, where to begin?

In several brief flashbacks, it's 1931 & Armenian artist Arshile Gorky (Simon Abkarian), having emigrated to North America, is shown painting a portrait based on a photograph of him & his mother taken in Turkish Armenia in 1912. Gorky's mother was subsequently killed in the genocide, & her memory haunts him deeply.

In the recent past, art historian Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), an Armenian living in Toronto, gives lectures on the life of Arshile Gorky & uses his painting of 1931 as a backdrop for her presentations . Ani is also a collaborator with film director Edward (Charles Aznavour) in the making of a film, also callled ARARAT, about the Turkish army's seige & capture of the Turkish Armenian city of Van in 1915 based on the memoirs of an American missionary, Clarence Ussher (Bruce Greenwood), stationed there. The inhabitants are subsequently burned alive, mutilated or tortured, or driven out into the desert where most are raped, bayoneted or shot. A young Gorky (Garen Boyajian) is one of the survivors. The 1915 timeline, & the events surrounding the Van abomination, are depicted in the scenes of the film within the film, ARARAT within ARARAT.

The last & most recent timeline has Ani's young, adult son Raffi (David Alpay) returning to Canada after spending time in Turkey filming footage of Van's ruins that could be used in the making of Edward's ARARAT. On his way through Customs, he's stopped by David (Christopher Plummer), a humorless inspector spending his last day on the job before retirement. In an extended sequence that apparently lasts hours, David interrogates Raffi about the contents of several film cans (of supposedly exposed film). David suspects they contain heroin, but listens to Raffi's earnest explanation of the ARARAT film & the events that inspired it because the young man is obviously a True Believer.

There's another subplot, which occurs before Raffi takes off to Turkey, involving Ani, Raffi, & the former's stepdaughter Celia (Marie-Josee Croze). Raffi is sleeping with Celia despite the fact that the latter believes Ani drove her second husband (Celia's father) to suicide. The relationship between Ani & Celia is decidedly not warm & fuzzy, & Raffi is caught in the middle. Raffi's own father, Ani's first husband, was an Armenian "freedom fighter" killed while trying to assassinate a Turkish official.

Have I lost you yet?

Perhaps director/producer/writer Atom Egoyan got so wrapped up in the artistic aspects of his creation that he lost his way amidst unnecessary complexity & simply blundered into his original goal, which was to produce a film that indeed thrusts the Armenian Genocide into the viewer's consciousness (and will perhaps throw gasoline on the smoldering embers of hatred of those who'd prefer not to forget past tribal vendettas). The David/Raffi & Ani/Celia interactions might better have been left on the cutting room floor & the old adage, "keep it simple", taken to heart. Certainly, truly great & memorable films about the bloody & savage business of ethnic cleansing can be made. SCHINDLER'S LIST comes immediately to mind. Would that Egoyan had seen it & taken notes on style.

Really disappointing - By: , 27 Dec 2004
I've always liked Atom Egoyan's films - Exotica was tremendous, The Sweet Hereafter was a tremendous adaptation of a reallly good book. All of which makes Ararat a very disappointing effort. It's preachy! The cinematography is great - it had a good cast - but the script was awful - exquisitely bad, even. There was enough material here to have made a good film.
A complex, brilliant and bold film - By: , 03 Dec 2004
I watched this film before work going to work one morning - I intended only to preview the first 5 minutes to see what style to expect (I'd never seen of Egoyan's previous films) but I couldn't take my eyes of it & watched the entire film through & thought about it most of the day. The film demands a lot of the viewer, with its non-linear narrative throwing the (still disputed) events of the Armenian genocide through a prism of different characters. With the modern cinema being dominated by safe formulaic pap, I'm glad that it's still possible for people to get the funding to make intelligent films like this. If you're looking for a beautifully crafted film that will reallly make you think then Ararat would be an excellent choice.
What went wrong? - By: Stephen Newton, 26 Feb 2004
Perhaps it’s a lack of confidence (or maybe some raw emotion) that leads the makers of Ararat to over egg the pudding. Aged memory & point of view distort history, the political echoes in the personal, but in the clumsiest way & characters – especiallly Aznavour – literallly shrink on screen.