Forgive but never forget

Enacting a plan for extermination written in 1915, the government of Turkey killed more than 1 million Turkish citizens of Armenian descent in the following years. After decades of total denial, Turkey has recently confirmed that half a million Turks siding with enemy forces were killed, but claims it was part of normal war-time activity -- and that both sides suffered heavy losses.

It is said that Hitler, in justifying the feasibility of genocide, explained to his advisers that, after all, "no one remembers the Armenians." I can't explain, exactly, why the world has remained so thoroughly in the dark about one of the heaviest moments of the last century, but Ararat very consciously begins the process of setting the record straight. With Ararat, Atom Egoyan -- cinema's most cerebral director -- has produced another intelligent, delicate film. Once again he presents his audience with thoroughly interconnected webs of plots and characters, and asks it to deduce for itself the film's actual center.

Dissecting the effects of the Armenian holocaust is more globally an attempt to fully comprehend, from several different angles, a trauma that's very nature is too horrible to digest -- and the aftermath of its repression. As Egoyan himself confirms, the film is a direct response to the type of cinema represented by Schindler's List. The brain rebels against direct command, and the filmmaker mistrusts films that impose emotions on their audience, a temptation more intense and more dangerous when dealing with a subject as weighty as genocide. He recognizes the filmmaker's responsibility to the deceased in approaching the subject without sentimentality, and attempting to decode it with as little decoration as possible.

Ararat's value, however, lies in its critical statement rather than its artistry. Cold in its complexity, the heavily intellectualized dissection spreads itself too thin for any real resonance. Although his narrative cubism is interesting, Egoyan's films could often benefit from some straightforward simplicity. Ararat, even more than his previous efforts, fractured and elliptical as they are, has an almost schizophrenic feel to it, as if Egoyan was so concerned with what his film is not that he never decided exactly what it is.

A look at his past few films -- Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia's Journey -- reveals a tendency toward extreme and disturbing subjects. This may indicate a creative sensibility too far removed from quotidian emotion to express itself in subtler forms.

The film twists around itself, a hall of mirrors in constant reflection. Technically, it tells the story of two families, but focuses primarily on that of Raffi (David Alpy), a Canadian-Armenian film student returning from a sort of pilgrimage to his ancestral homeland. At the heart of the film lies Ararat, a production led by much-respected film director Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour).

Quietly reproducing the Jewish Spielberg, the Armenian-born Saroyan, whose family was torn apart by Turkish cruelty, tells the story of his people's suffering -- his dream project -- through a white, Western mouthpiece. Events big and small echo off each other for characters of several generations -- Armenian, Turkish and white -- in the past and present.

There's something seductive in a jigsaw puzzle this intricately crafted. This movie has great beauty in it, with sensitive performances from all the Egoyan regulars (especially Elias Koteas as a Turkish actor) and a wonderful turn by Charles Aznavour as the director, but it is not a satisfyingly complete experience.

Egoyan is an artist whose primary talent lies in analysis. He was able to extract a film of aching, unparalleled beauty from Russell Banks' novel, The Sweet Hereafter five years ago. Perhaps he needs that sort of external base on which to direct his critical gaze, an assumed emotional presence, because the internally generated, overly refined sentiments of Ararat have been sufficiently removed from the film's core to be, basically, non-essential. This film grasps desparately for greater truths, and although its reach is painfully sincere and nobly directed, it ultimately comes up empty.