600 Ancient Seeds Of Imperfection

First, thank you 2007-2008 Men's World Figure Skating Champion Jeffrey Buttle for skating to the score of Ararat this recently completed skating season.

This was the only Egoyan film I had not yet watched, for several reasons, but when I watched one of your first Grand Prix skating long programmes this past season, I was so enthralled by the score, I considered watching the film. After your breathtaking Worlds programme, I was finally inspired to watch the film, and purchased it.

This film would have been more effective if the director presented the Armenian sequences as genuinely crafted extensive historical flashbacks (to show the extent of the massacres) with enhanced context and cinematography and acting performances, and provided more cohesive continuity, instead of using clichéd soundstage re-enactments discordantly interpolated throughout the underdeveloped and choppy present-day plotline.

I understand that Egoyan was trying to use an innovative method to capture and maintain the audience's attention - threading together a summarized record of the history of the Armenians and their massacre with poignant depictions of present-day "diaspora" Armenians in Canada struggling with identity, cultural, and ethnic crises, but, because of the gravity of the topic, he should have scaled back the innovation and instead focused on cinematically illustrating in enhanced historical detail Armenian history and the massacre, and broadened the overall acting performances by providing depth to the characters.

What Egoyan does demonstrate, either intentionally or intentionally, is that the self-victimization of the Armenian characters, and their explicit, unhindered, relentless focus on the Armenian massacre, impeded their ability to not only understand each other and their own individual crises, but their ability to reconcile with each other to preserve and defend and promote their culture and language (which they did retain) and traditions and history, to preserve and defend and promote their national identity and roots.

The Armenian characters, not even the mom and Saroyan the film director, did not realize their acculturation to the country they were living in (which happened to be Canada) dramatically minimized and virtually muted their ethnic connection to Turkey/Armenia.

They were so intent on trying to publically prove the specific event of the massacre - which they failed to do because Egoyan only presented one instance of killings that occurred during the siege of the city of Van - that they forgot about presenting Armenia's historology and culture and achievements, and, when Elias Koteas tried to discuss the historical context of the massacre, and Saroyan immediately dismissed him, Saroyan's reaction and unjustified explanation for the reaction negated the gravity and credibility of the massacre itself, and discredited the overall self-victimization of the Armenian characters.

We have a group of people who were massively decimated, and that type of mass carnage is obviously horrific, but what must we automatically sympathize with the descendants of the massacred ancestors who were born and raised in a completey different geopolitical location? What if the ancestors were "illegally occupying" Turkey? What if they were an indigenous group of people with draconian traditions whom were actively revolting against the Turkish powers? What if they were the progenitors of Turks and the first occupants of the land who had been systematically killed because they refused assimilation? And for those of us already familiar with Armenian history, what if the armed Armenian nationalist groups (Hunchaks, Dashnaks, etc) and the Armenian populace were plotting to join forces with the Russian Czar's Christian army to seize Anatolia and the Caucasus in order to re-establish ancient Anatolia, which led to Turkey countering the nationalistic forces in order to prevent another war front in the Ottoman Empire?

Massacre or no Massacre, the Armenians in the film had zero interest in learning about the cultural backdrop of their own ancestry (not even Rafi, he only wanted to validate his mother's stories because the thought of his mother as a liar was clearly more upsetting to him than any massacre), nor did they have any remote interest in celebrating and preserving their heritage or achievements, except to promote a painting and an autobiography that proved a massacre. Their sole interest was to pretend to be victims - despite being born and raised in Canada and acculturated in a Western lifestyle - and dismiss any attempts at examining their historical background and observing cultural traditions.

The film depicts "diaspora" Armenians as a culture firmly fixated on a massacre and firmly alienated from Armenian culture (past and present).

The cultural reference to the pomegranate was an astronomic miscalculation and indication that Egoyan himself is oblivious to history: the pomegranate, contrary to Armenian belief, first emerged as a fruit and as a cultural and culinary symbol in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India, then spread as a cultural and culinary symbol throughout the entire Middle East, and Asia, Eurasia, Greece, Spain, Mexico, and beyond.

The symbolic meaning of the pomegranate was clear - pomegranates only grow in dry conditions, the Armenians only feel and grow and "progress" when they are void of and ignore their own history and culture (except language), pomegranates root and decay in wet conditions, the Armenians mentally decay when floods of critical questions and doubts and history in its full context inundate them.

Returning to the diaspora concept, none of the Armenians, except Rafi, exhibited any tangible desire to visit Turkey/Armenia, nor did they view their ethnic land as a desirable location to return to, an actual ancestral land where they could unite and rebuild their culture and nation. None of them, except the enigmatic non-Armenian David (Christopher Plummer) exhibited any reticence or discontent with being acculturated into Canadian/Western culture, none of them appeared to feel alienated or insulated from their own ethnic roots, not even the girlfriend, who was strictly frustrated because of Ani's trivialization and dismissal of her father's (and Ani's second husband's) death.

Nothing the Armenians did indicated they wanted a restoration of their original homeland and nation, that they vicariously related to their ancestral homeland, they engaged in any kind of ethnocummunal solidarity, and that meant the Armenians were not "diaspora" because diaspora indicates a nation scattered from an ancestral homeland that desires to re-unite and return to the homeland.

And, strangely, nothing the characters presented conclusively proved a "genocide" or even massacre occurred.

Egoyan's presentation of the film's strongest theme - memory versus facts versus the fabricated realities people con themselves into believing to make their lives bearable - indicated the massacre itself either never occurred or was exaggerated.

I had the impression that since they were ashamed that their ancestors were unable to defend themselves against violence they themselves possibly instigated, they were exaggerating the circumstances of their deaths to transform the shame and embarrassment and guilt into justifiable scapegoatable anger towards the Turks.

Egoyan ignored the historical fact that during the early 1900's the Turks and other Muslims were also being raped and massacred and expelled from their homes and entire villages and cities by the Russians and Britain and France. The Russians laid inhumane waste and destruction to Anatolia, which resulted in raging starvation and epidemics that killed Turks, in addition to Armenians.

He also ignored the historical fact that Armenians fought side by side with the Ottomans and were serving in the Ottoman government, and that the Ottomans never killed Armenians in Istanbul, Izmir, or Aleppo.

And while the Armenian tragedy was real and horrific, Egoyan ignored the fact that other national groups suffered massive killings at that time, many of which were at a larger scale then the Armenian killings, thus negating the use of the intellectually dishonest and distorted and revisionist use of the term "genocide".

During WWI, 1,500,000 Armenians were killed, 1,700,000 Russians were killed, 1,327,000 French people were killed, 1,100,000 Austrian-Hungarians were killed, 908,371 British people were killed, 460,000 Italians were killed, etc, etc.

Saroyan asserts massive genocidal systematic killings occurred based on one eyewitness account, and Rafi's mom insists the killings occurred based on one painter's childhood, and both accounts are repudiated by Egoyan when he has Saroyan refuse to discuss the historical backdrop of Turkey in 1915, when he has Rafi's mother continuously exaggerate the painter's feelings and insist her husband was a hero and insist on dismissing the death of her second-husband out of guilt because she admittedly caused him to commit suicide (which correlates to Armenians feeling guilt about possibly instigating violence against themselves and being unable to defend themselves), when Egoyan has David (Plummer, in an Oscar-deserving performance) violate criminal laws by releasing Rafi despite the heroin in the film reel, when he has Rafi construct his lie to David in order to subconsciously reveal his version of the truth, and when he has Saroyan's film partner place Mount Ararat close to the city of Van which is geographically incorrect.

The sum total of which Egoyan directly illustrates to us that truth is subjective and virtually unknowable, which ironically means that, according to Egoyan's own thematic logic, it is unknowable whether or not an Armenian massacre occurred.

This film can either be a 5/10 for its face value (lackluster everything, linear acting, only Plummer was intensely impressionable and effective) or a 10/10 for its fathomless subtextual, hermeneutical, semiotic value.