 |
|
Cannes Report - Monday, May 20
BY JOHN HARKNESS
CANNES – I've finally figured out my problem with Atom
Egoyan's films.
Ararat, which screens tonight in the Cannes
Competition, is a two hour movie about the attempt in
1915 by the Turks to wipe out the Armenians. Except
that it's not. It's actually a movie about a bunch of
people – a filmmaker, a screenwriter, an art
historian, her son – talking about the Armenian
holocaust 85 years after the fact.
This construction allows Egoyan to avoid dealing
directly with the emotional horror that must be
engendered by having someone try to kill everyone in
your bloodline. The emotions in this film are, in
essence, third hand, with art used not as a way to
confront and transmute emotional trauma but as a
method of keeping the horror at arms' length. It keeps
the horror in a box.
There's a lot of things that art does, and a lot of
different ways that it can do those things, but the
longer I look at film, at painting, at literature, the
shorter my patience with art that exists as
intellectual construction rather than emotional
reality. Which is to say, I find it much easier to
appreciate Cezanne than Seurat, that I prize Mahler
over Stravinsky, Faulkner over Pynchon, and Mike Leigh
over Antonioni. There's nothing wrong with art that
presents intellectual challenges, but to use a
monument of modernist intellectual gamesmanship, all
the complex literary gamesmanship of Joyce's Ulysses
is transcended by the emotional realities of Leopold
Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom – the
construction is a setting for the emotional content –
by the time Joyce reaches Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the
emotional truth in Joyce's understanding of his
characters obliterates the construction – we don't see
the setting around the jewel.
Egoyan is inclined to give us this kind of structure
anyway – Exotica's central event is never seen, only
its aftermath in flashback. If one can say the same of
Egoyan's masterpiece, The Sweet Hereafter
(significantly not an original Egoyan screenplay),
that film is relentlessly about the emotional impact
of that event – any kind of respectful adaptation of
Russell Banks' novel makes that unavoidable.
I'm not sure what Egoyan's working out personally
here, but as an audience member, I simply failed to
develop any interest in the Armenian thing – speaking
as someone whose people have been in Canada for many
generations, it's something that happened a long time
ago to people I don't know in a place I'd have a lot
of trouble finding on the map. Intellectually, I know
I should care about this, but, to be completely
honest, emotionally it doesn't touch me.
This is perhaps unfair, but it seems to me that if an
artist is going to deal with an historical issue that
no one knows much about, it's his job as a director
establish an emotional connection that leads the
audience into the story, and Egoyan's methodology
simply refuses that access. He's doing an awful lot of
telling and very little showing, and making, in
essence a movie that's so busy worrying about artistic
responsibity that it doesn't take any.
|
|
|
