Writer-director Atom Egoyan’s complicated, heavily-plotted melodrama about the making of a film illuminating the Armenian Holocaust of 1915-18 at the hands of the Turks dares you, with its important yet obscure topic, not to admire it. But it’s a mixed bag. Egoyan is a victim of his own ambitions: so many stories tackle so many entwined conflicts—historical, familial, cultural—with such a broad swirl that it frequently drowns the viewer in overkill. Egoyan messes with your head by pulling all sorts of theatrical manipulations, with heavy cross-cutting between various plots and revealing motivations piecemeal; but he primarily operates by extruding a feeling of helpless horror from you—the atrocities committed by the Turks include the torture of children, rape and the act of being set on fire. Yet he lets you off the hook by allowing you to distance yourself from the horrors: they’re depicted as graphic scenes from the film, not actual events. The effect, while powerful when you’re watching it, is something of a cheat: you walk away devastated but a little angry at being controlled. Egoyan invests a lot of personal emotion in his film yet it’s frequently obscured by fragmented storytelling; and his outrage at the end that Turkey has never apologized for its atrocities has the feel of a non-negotiable demand that he insists the viewer share simply by having viewed his film. It’s tastefully made, with impressive set design by Kathleen Climie and solid performances by the prodigious cast (including Elias Koteas, Arsinee Khanjian, Christopher Plummer and Charles Aznavour), but it’s talky without seeming conclusive (except in its political stance) and overly reliant on Mychael Danna’s intrusive score.
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