★★☆☆☆
CINEMA has the power to tell important stories that might otherwise stay buried forever, unfairly relegated to history as its suppressors hope they are never thrust into the consciousness of a mass audience.
This nobly intended but unfortunately rather lethargic and muddled film sheds a spotlight on the Armenian genocide that occurred in 1915 when the Turkish military attempted to get rid of the Armenian people under the guise of mass relocation.
In the midst of all this is Michael (Oscar Isaac), an Armenian apothecary and aspiring doctor who desperately wants to get his degree and return to his home village in the Turkish mountains to treat people in need.
One day he travels to Constantinople to study at a prestigious school where he meets American journalist Chris (Christian Bale, left) and his romantic interest Ana (Charlotte Le Bon). The trio soon finds itself thrust into a changing world of political, religious and personal turmoil.
Despite attempting to tell a very worthy and vital story, the facts of which would be shocking to anyone with any shred of decency, writer-director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda, In The Name Of The Father) has inserted an invented, unneeded and strangely uninvolving love triangle that, despite the best efforts of a respectable but ultimately wasted cast, never rings true and doesn’t amount to much except to distract us from the genocidal tragedy at the heart of the true story.
A film which takes its time to tell its sprawling historical story can be a splendid thing, as shown in recent adventure The Lost City Of Z. But while it shares a certain visual handsomeness with that film, this simply doesn’t have a good enough handle on pace or tone to keep the drama anywhere near as engaging as the awful true story demands.
It’s far too preoccupied with sappiness to truly get under the skin of its real-life subject matter, a distracting eye consistently on trying to be a sweeping romance set against a backdrop of wartime strife in the vein of Casablanca or Doctor Zhivago that it never quite works as a whole cinematic piece.
Whenever it does throw up something tough, such as a scene involving the central figures attempting to flee Turkish forces and happening across a mass group of bodies, it feels completely out of step with the rest of the film. It’s this tonal clash, a frustrating obsession with derivative romance and an inability to grab on to the inherent tragedy and meaning of the true story that renders the film a flat and unsatisfying cinematic experience.
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