CINEMA
Turning inward
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GOWRI RAMNARAYAN writes about two Canadian films, screened at the IFFI 2004, which gave viewers something to think about.
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AN old poet told another, "Load every rift with ore". The International Film Festival of India 2004 proved that this is a more urgent need today for filmmakers across the world. The choice of sound themes was not always a guarantor of depth and intricacy. However, the Canadian Showcase, assembled by Gautam Hooja, did respect audience intelligence.
Take "Ararat", by noted director Atom Egoyan. Yes, the same man to whom an admiring film maker Wim Wenders gave away his own award in 1987 as more deserving.) "Ararat" is Egoyan's personal and artistic statement, set into peel-within-peel layers of time, place and characters. Each segment was filtered through distinct lighting and tempo. There is more ore here than the rift can hold. Better than flimsiness?
Haunting matrix
As the landing place of Noah's ark, from where life returned to the deluge-destroyed earth, Ararat's very name spells awesome myth. In the film, the dumb volcano witnesses the genocide of a million peaceful Armenian citizens of Ottoman Turkey in 1915. Atom Egoyan's depiction of this forgotten, unknown, still-unacknowledged atrocity had drawn Turkish picketers to mob the Cannes Palace of Festivals. "A propaganda of hatred," they raged. But for the survivors scattered across the globe, the event remains a haunting matrix of their Armenian identity.
The 1915 genocide itself is reassembled in film-within-film sequences, on shoots and screenings. Paradoxically, the stagey lighting, shoddy sets, breaks between shots, all create a hyper reality. The soft-voiced oral testimonies of the holocaust survivors are inter-cut with tortures, disembowellings, decapitations and virgins forced to dance naked before being raped and killed. The frames always include the shooting crew, and onlookers, to emphasise distance, but the device chills you to the marrow. Such re-viewing makes them synonymous with atrocities everywhere, in Israel and Palestine, Iraq and Indonesia, Bangladesh and Bosnia.
The film has renowned filmmaker Edouard Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) enlisting the help of art historian Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), who specialises in the American Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky. For both the fictive Saroyan and the real Egoyan, Gorky's suicide and, even more, his act of painting his holocaust victim mother's portrait in his New York atelier become resonant motifs.
His troubled relationship with his mother Ani makes it even more difficult for young Raffi (David Alpay) to understand whether his father — killed while attempting to assassinate a Turkish diplomat — was a nationalist or a terrorist. His affair with tumbling-over-the-edge druggie stepsister (Marie Josee Cruze) burns with stranger fires as she holds his mother accountable for her father's death.
Narrativised in the relentless airport interrogation over Raffi's "unopenable" cans of films, by about-to-retire customs officer David (Christopher Plummer), the film is split and spliced with a measured deliberation. The pace is slow, but so insistent that the crawls turn into sprints. David's discomfort with his son's gay lifestyle and part-Turkish boyfriend is part of the relay race, with that partner in turn becoming an actor in Saroyan's film. He would like to deny that history which depicts Turks as assassins, or apportion blame to the Armenians. Another brief, staying moment catches the lead actor and director watching their film's premiere. Their expressions defy analysis.
Look beyond facts
Finally, David comes to terms with his son by letting Raffi go, even though the boy is guilty. He has learnt to look beyond damning facts, into possibilities of redemption. The film peers into the Ararat within each one of us. A refuge? A sanctuary? A launching pad for life? Or a deceptively quiescent volcano, smouldering with hell fires?
The actors rose to the disturbing temperatures of Egoyan's theme, especially Plummer, who actualised mood shifts from the aggressive to the tender, in misgivings and in certainties. Alpay, Khanjian and Croze allowed nothing overblown or maudlin into their emotional scenes. Raffi returns from his "pilgrimage" to the site of the Armenian genocide. His video recording there, of an ancient Madonna and Child, from a ruined Eastern Orthodox Church, holds the key to the maze. The Madonna's eyes startle you into realising that Gorky's "Mother and Child", as well as Ani and Raffi meeting at the airport, are but reflections of that same universal, eternal, iconic reality. You now know that the film is only partly about the genocide of a particular race in historic time. Or about a present-day immigrant community, unable to escape its heritage of soul-numbing shadows. The story of mankind is the history of horrors, 20th Century taking a backseat compared to earlier times when entire races were exterminated — by axes, not atom bombs. IFFI 2004 brought the exhilaration of a Denys Arcand film (Remember his masterpiece "Jesus of Montreal"?). Arcand is unabashedly cerebral; his scripts build literary polemics. He transforms those intellectual debates into emotional experiences pierced with dauntless satire and deadly irony. This genius lit up every frame of his new film "Barbarian Invasions"(2004). This sequel to the "Decline of the American Empire" is heady with dialogue, witty, frolicsome, pensive, poignant, but the visuals speak as much, welling up into soul-searching pauses, self-critical silences.
Social democrat college professor Remy, dying of brain tumour, has rich capitalist son Sebastien turning an abandoned wing in an overcrowded hospital into a private sanctuary; assembling his father's family and friends to his bedside; and finally ensconcing him in a lakeside retreat for the final hours. Wife and son no longer resent Remy's philanderings, they welcome his past mistresses to cheer his last hours. Estrangements melt; friends re-discover each other. The oceanographer daughter stays away but sends computer video messages against blowing winds and whipping waves. When Remy is unable to relish wine and truffles at the banquet in his honour, he finally accepts that his life, as he wants it, is quite over. But life goes on. "I want you to have a son as fine as mine," he tells Sebastien. "I take your smiles with me," he assures the living.
Black comedy
Terminal illness makes a fantastic, fun-filled irreverent backdrop for black comedy, exploding with comments on humankind's barbarian invasion of the planet. The Roman Empire supplies historic examples and metaphors for decadence, accelerated by images from Christian conquests, Inquisitions and ethnic cleansings. 9/11 shrinks in impact when compared to the North American genocides of the 200,000 "Red Indians", and similar decimations in every continent, in every century. Disease, epidemics, drugs and natural disasters cannot compete with such mega-scale massacres. All this comes to us in sparkling-foaming verbal currents.
Another barbarian trail opens up in the son's search for heroin to ease his father's pain. Sebastien gets his supply from Nathalie, a classmate-turned-junkie, played with a moving sensitivity by Marie-Josee Cruze. This interlude mends and creates relationships in ways that can be understood only by instinct, especially the magical sparks between Sebastien and Nathalie, futureless, fated to be extinguished in a blind alley.
Arcand's magnificent Quebecois navarasa feast freezes a Muslim (Indian? Pakistani?) immigrant family around a hospital bed. There is no exchange between Remy's world and theirs. That is when the film's title spins on its axis and stops at a point of re(dis?)location. Arcand said that the less obvious barbarian invasions can "change who we are as individuals". With mocking, rollicking, sigh-streaked guffaws, his film ignites that inward turning, perhaps into directions he did not visualise.
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