Egoyan at his provocative best
Article paru dans "Toronto Star" le 05/09/2002

By Geoff Pevere, Movie Critic

Toronto director expands his artistic vision with opening-night work that uses movie-making to explore truth, history and moral The defining factor in Atom Egoyan's movies is also the dividing one: His sceptical self-consciousness.

Few other filmmakers have regarded the act of representation with quite as much passionate suspicion as Egoyan, whose movies insist that we be as aware of the moral implications of what we watch as the aesthetic results. As the creator of movies that have taken the very presumption of filmmaking - or image-making and storytelling in general - as their principle subject, his work has tended to be suspended in a kind of hermetic dramatic limbo.

This accounts for the peculiar rhythms, layered storylines and pregnant hesitancies in Egoyan's work: When the very idea of what constitutes movie drama is open to question, drama becomes something else. The story told is the telling of the story.

Needless to say, this also accounts for the dramatically divided response Egoyan's movies tend to generate. When you mess with the mechanics of dramatic yarn-spinning, you're penetrating the very source of narrative pleasure. You can't suspend disbelief when what you're watching actively promotes it. And none of Egoyan's films has quite so lavishly or deliberately questioned the presumption and implications of storytelling as Ararat.

So we shouldn't be surprised that Egoyan's movie dealing with the Armenian genocide by the Turkish army in 1915 isn't really about the genocide but about the making of a movie about the genocide. The centre of the film is a rather plain-looking historical movie being made by a past-prime director named Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), but the bulk of Ararat's primary dramatic conflicts involves not what's happening in the movie but what's happening around it: The relationship between Saroyan and his license-taking screenwriter (Eric Bogosian), between the screenwriter and the scholarly consultant (Arsinée Khanjian), between the scholarly consultant and her son (David Alpay), and - most crucially, though at first blink most marginally related to the actual making of the movie - between the son and the Canada Customs agent (Christopher Plummer) who interrogates the young man when he tries to bring unmarked cans of film into the country from Turkey.

In turn, each of these relationships - which are at first connected only obliquely - is defined by the issue of storytelling. Whose story will prevail as the one of record, and whose will be forgotten in the process?

By putting the event in the metaphorical quotation marks provided by a movie-within-a-movie, Egoyan not only puts a certain amount of strategic intellectual distance between himself and the historical event - which remains a matter of intensely contentious dispute between Armenians and Turks - he finds a way of making Ararat both intimate and epic. While it grows organically out of his other movies about people struggling to find the proper discourse of experience, it also opens up upon some truly consequential and pertinent media-age issues.

In addressing the film-with-a-film's willingness to compromise the historical record for purposes of dramatic impact, Ararat addresses the increasingly dubious relationship between history and entertainment.

In drawing parallels between the selective tendencies of the movie's makers with Turkish denial of the real events, Egoyan implicates everyone in the process of tailoring the truth to meet particular needs. Indeed, even the character most passionately involved with the pursuit and protection of the "truth" - the academic played by Khanjian - is oblivious to the same passionate drive in her own stepdaughter (Marie-Josée Croze), and only because the truth the younger woman seeks - concerning the death of her father - is not as important to her stepmother is to her.

If the concepts at work in the movie represent Egoyan's predominant themes projected across his broadest dramatic canvas yet, the method of their articulation represents the director's characteristic aesthetic strategies distilled to a display of self-referencing signature flourishes. The slow lateral pans marking hushed, hesitant conversations, the emphasis on transitory, artificial and sterile environments, the weaving of initially unrelated dramatic strands in patterns as sinuously mysterious as Mychael Danna's characteristically multi-cultural musical score.

Which means that while Ararat refers to issues and experiences that extend far beyond anything Egoyan's movies have ever addressed before, it is also the unmistakable product of an unmistakably distinctive artistic vision.

Ararat is a movie that both calls for and pays off careful consideration - I've seen it twice - and that means it may have
to wait a while for reasonable judgment.

Those expecting a blood-curdling indictment of the Armenian genocide will be initially disappointed, as will those who
insist on confusing an evolving personal style with bankruptcy or repetition.

Ararat will have to get past these unfortunate rites of initial passage to be judged not for what it isn't but what it is, which
is a pertinent powerfully intelligent account of the morality of making history.