A crowd-pleaser that may just get you
thinking about a largely unknown event that desperately needs an airing. (Review
by Patrick Compton - 7)
Congratulations to the producers of this
movie who have dared to make a commercially viable product out of one of the
world’s most shameful and under-acknowledged events.
The event in question was the attempt by
the Ottoman Muslim caliphate in 1915 to exterminate the Armenian population
within their borders. If we’re being pedantic, it was not a “genocide” (the
word only entered our language in 1943) but it was surely an attempt at race
extermination, with 1.5 million Armenians killed during and just after World
War One.
This terrible event not only included mass
murder, but the erasure of all traces of Armenian life, from the destruction of
their churches and libraries and institutes to the crude altering of official
Turkish maps and schoolbooks in an attempt to deny that there had ever been an
Armenia in the first place. It would be laughable, if it weren’t so serious,
that respective Turkish governments continue to deny that it happened.
It has to be said that The Promise is by no means a definitive account of this Armenian
holocaust. It is, rather, a vividly filmed adventure story with a strong
romantic element that uses the Armenian conflict as its context. The importance
of the film is that it attempts to introduce the subject to a mass audience.
Hopefully, more – and better – movies on this subject will now be made.
The
Promise makes no bones about its intentions: it was
funded by the (Armenian) Kerkorian Foundation based in the US, and produced by
an Armenian-American company. It is also directed by Irishman Terry George who
is no stranger to the subject of genocide, having made the Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda.
But rather than appeal to specialists,
George has looked to create an entertainment that appeals to a mass audience
that has little or no knowledge of Armenia. The scale is enormous, with the
movie drenched in expensive production values with some spectacular sunsets,
battle scenes and mountainous vistas. The inspiration is clearly movies like Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, albeit that The
Promise is inferior to both.
If the location shooting is impressive, the
human drama is less so although the movie benefits from a convincing
performance from Oscar Isaac who stars as an Armenian student, Michael,
studying to be a doctor in a seething Constantinople on the brink of war.
Michael has promised to marry a girl back
in his village, and her dowry has enabled him to pursue his studies. Meanwhile,
he meets a beautiful Armenian artist, Ana (Charlotte le Bon), who has been
educated in Paris, and her drunken boyfriend, Associated Press reporter Chris
(Christian Bale). As war approaches, and Ottoman hostility towards local
Armenians becomes more focused, so this romantic triangle starts to hum.
The movie is far from perfect. The causes
of the genocide are not pursued in any detail, some of the dialogue is stiff
and the action wooden while the action is punctuated by a number of
tear-stained partings and sobbing reunions that may not impress the filmically
austere.
Still, even if the movie is second-rate
David Lean, it’s a crowd-pleaser and it may just get you thinking about a
largely unknown event that desperately needs an airing.
The
Promise opened at Cinema Nouveau, Gateway, on June
23, 2017. – Patrick Compton
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