DVD Watch

Ararat

Atom Egoyan’s cri de coeur about the Armenian massacre of 1915 gets a fitting two-disc release, with interviews, featurettes about the genocide, and director’s commentary that hardly pauses for a breath. It’s a good thing, too — Ararat is stuffed with interwoven storylines, a film within the film, and weighty symbolism (watch out for pomegranates, Noah’s Ark, loose buttons, poetic epigraphs, and the music of the duduk). Egoyan (Exotic, The Sweet Hereafter) loves layered subplots and morally conflicted characters who twist in the wind over time that stretches and contracts with the pacing of each scene. Relationships build; secrets emerge. These complexities are usually rewarding, but here they often struggle against Egoyan’s polemical purpose: exposing the slaughter of a million people (as characters in the film assert) and holding the modern state of Turkey accountable for an official apology. There’s just too much obscure stuff going on. Fortunately, Egoyan’s commentary is brisk and insightful. He doesn’t dwell on behind-the-scenes gossip or production trivia. Rather, he explains the visual language used to tell the story. The discussion of the film’s opening image — a long, wordless mise-en-scène take skimming over an artist’s workshop and canvas — clearly lays out the film’s themes and illuminates the very process of cinematic narration. (It’s well worth a look for aspiring filmmakers.) The commentary also makes clear how much Egoyan, a Canadian citizen of Armenian extraction, has personally invested in this production. Without his words, the film seems aloof at times, too cerebral and self-consciously structured to really grip the heart. With them, Ararat seems like a vision quest. Egoyan lets his guard down long enough to confess that shooting the film within the film was a kick; unlike his own body of work, it has big, bombastic action scenes. And while Ararat is probably still overlong and overstuffed, the deleted sequences (cut, the commentary explains, because they were unnecessary and complicated) boggle the mind. The nicest surprise on the DVD is “Portrait of Arshile,” a lyrical film co-produced by BBC America. Egoyan’s young son looks into the camera while the director and his wife, Ararat star Arsinée Khanjian, explain the boy’s namesake, Armenian painter and genocide survivor Arshile Gorky. In four minutes and with one image, the film conveys the agony and loss of losing one’s community, one’s family, one’s history.

This article appears in August 8 • 2003.