Dazed and confused

Ararat is the mountain where the Ark supposedly came to rest after the Flood. But Atom Egoyan's eponymous film looks as if Noah made the better job of cargo-packing. It is a mess, cramming in every inflammatory ethnic item on this Canadian-Armenian director's agenda.

Egoyan has dedicated so much time and feeling to the historical wounds of his race that the emotion is festering. He complicates his urge to commemorate the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks at Van by overloading his film with contemporary issues that are contrived and convoluted.

The genocide is the subject of the film-within-the-film shot in Toronto by a director (Charles Aznavour). The flashbacks to the real events at Van sketch in the family drama of Armenian artist Arshile Gorky, then a child of eight, who immortalised his selfsacrificing mother in a painting 20 years later. The painting is the thematic and sentimental link between past and present.

All this should have been enough for any film. But Egoyan piles on a contemporary story about Raffi, a young Armenian-Canadian (David Alpay), whose father was killed trying to assassinate a Turkish diplomat.

Just back from Turkey with film secretly shot for Aznavour's opus,

Raffi may also be smuggling heroin for his stepsister Celia, with whom he has a thing going. She shows up at her art-historian mother's every lecture, threatening to vandalise the Gorky painting. Raffi is interrogated at Toronto airport by a customs officer (Christopher Plummer) who is mad at his own son (Brent Carver) for forming a gay union with a Turkish actor, Ali (Elias Koteas).

All these squabbles in Toronto are disproportionately petty compared to the magnitude of the Armenian holocaust. But Egoyan treats everything in the same emphatic, didactic, discursive manner. It is nearly always a mistake to show a film being made.

Aznavour's efforts to re-create events in 1915 suggest such an amateurish piece of dramaturgy that the ovation he receives from the premiere audience only adds to the impression of Ararat as an overly schematic case for the prosecution.

Ararat
Cert: cert15