ATOMIC WEIGHTBy Mary Glucksman
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Atom Egoyan |
Director Atom Egoyan offers his most complex movie yet with Ararat, a story about the 1915 Turkish massacre of Armenians that uses the production of an historical epic film about the subject to toggle between past and present. French singer Charles Aznavour plays the director of the film-within-the-film and Eric Bogosian is the screenwriter. (Like Egoyan, both are of Armenian descent.) Also in the cast playing actors conflicted by their roles in the production are Bruce Greenwood (JFK in 13 Days) and Elias Koteas (Crash), both Egoyan regulars, along with Christopher Plummer (The Insider), and Egoyan's wife, Arsinee Khanjian (A Ma Soeur!).
Since Turkey has yet to officially acknowledge the 1915 genocide–the Turkish government maintains that Armenians were only removed from the eastern "war zone"–all of Ararat is being shot in Canada.
Ararat is not the first time Egoyan–who was born in Cairo, Egypt, to Armenian parents, and was raised in Victoria, Britsh Columbia–has explored his Armenian heritage on film. In his first feature, Next of Kin (1983), a bored young Canadian, while receiving experimental "video therapy," discovers tapes of an Armenian family who are missing a son. The young man assumes the identity of the long-lost boy, and is readily adopted by this new "family". In Calendar (1993), a photographer (Egoyan) and his wife (Khanjian) are shown during a trip to Armenia, touring the countryside. Over the course of their journey a guide relates the history of the area, which the wife translates for the benefit of the photographer. The photographer's relative disinterest in the context of the pictures he's taking for a calendar of the region puts a strain on his relationship with his wife. It is later revealed that the wife, in fact, remained in Armenia with the tour guide, leaving the photographer to consider why she left him.
As anyone with a working knowledge of Egoyan's films would guess, Ararat functions as a rich tapestry of storytelling parallel to and radiating out from the central action of the production of the film-within-the-film. When the film crew's driver (newcomer David Alpay) is stopped at Canadian customs with containers he says contain location footage, the story he tells the agent (Plummer) spirals into an examination of both men's painful family situations that employs Egoyan's trademark mix of memory, imagination and self-analysis.
Ararat, a region of Armenia, is also the name of the largest and highest (16,940 feet, 5,165 m) volcano in far eastern Turkey, bordering Armenia, Iran and Iraq. The volcano is thought to be the resting place of Noah's ark and therefore the cradle of civilization.
When will you get to see Ararat? Miramax bought the film this spring a week into production and we're betting they'll hold it for a Cannes 2002 premiere. That would be the 41-year-old Egoyan's fifth appearance on the Croisette: Hereafter and Exotica, another Miramax release, premiered in Competition, and early items Family Viewing (1987) and Speaking Parts (1991) were selected for the fest's Directors Fortnight.
Fans will have a chance to see Egoyan at work on Ararat in a half-hour documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter) shot for an Independent Film Channel series on directors that also includes episodes on Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski.
Also see: Atom Egoyan on the work of Shirin Neshat, and Kevin Murphy's interview with Egoyan.
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