**/****
starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Brent Carver
written and directed by Atom Egoyan
by Bill Chambers Shuffling the picture's sequences like a deck of cards, Atom Egoyan's signature postmodernism smacks of a diversionary tactic this time in Ararat. A film about the Armenian Genocide was Egoyan's dream project, yet he maintains an intellectual distance throughout, transparently terrified of the ostensible subject matter. Drawing from his well-stocked stable of actors while tossing a few fresh faces into the mix, Egoyan casts wife Arsinée Khanjian as an art history critic named Ani, newcomer David Alpay as her son, Raffi, bombshell Marie-Josée Croze as her stepdaughter (who happens to be Raffi's lover), and Exotica vets Bruce Greenwood and Elias Koteas (in the film's most compelling performance) as actors in a docudrama being directed by Edward (Charles Aznavour) and produced by Rouben (Eric Bogosian), for which Ani is the technical advisor. (Also recycled from Egoyan's Exotica are issues with customs in a hollow framing story co-starring Christopher Plummer.) The movie-within-the-movie depicts the Turkish government's mass murder of its Armenian citizens, and unfortunately, this is our only window into that atrocity: through scenes we know to be thus in a project continually criticized by Ani for taking poetic license and looks mockingly artificial besides. The French Lieutenant's Woman gimmick perhaps says more about the stench of Oscar bait–with Greenwood's American doctor character the typical white saviour in a foreign land–than it does about anything else, and it reduces the victims of a holocaust to extras on Stage 9. More crucially, even the depiction of what is explicitly "faked" violence lacks the visceral shock of Schindler's List; politeness is no way to raise our ire or even send us to the library. (Welcome to Canada, I suppose.) Too timid to bring a sense of closure to an ugly chapter in twentieth-century history, Ararat finds Egoyan up to his old tricks with nothing up his sleeve. PROGRAM: GALAS
