Andrew Pulver
With his Armenian heritage, this counts as deeply personal territory
for Guédiguian; though you sense that the director’s uncompromising
political sternness makes it difficult for him to fully plant a flag.
Nevertheless, he has produced a film that both acts as a useful primer
for understanding the decades-long grievance that the Armenian genocide produced, and discusses the peculiar politics of direct action terror in the 1970s.
Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad begins with a black-and-white preface, describing the assassination of Talaat Pasha,
the Ottoman minister generally considered to have initiated the 1915
massacres, by Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin in 1921; he was acquitted by a
German court who, somewhat ironically, were outraged by Tehlirian’s
accounts of Turkish-organised death marches and concentration camps. The
film then abruptly cuts to the 1970s and the Armenian diaspora in
Marseilles where we home in on a storekeeper called Hovannes (Simon
Abkarian, from Army of Crime), his wife Anouch (Ariane Ascaride,
Guédiguian’s wife and regular collaborator), and hotheaded son Aram
(Syrus Shahidi). Fed with tales of Turkish brutality by Anouch’s aged
mother, Aram joins a local group of like-minded agitators, which becomes
the gateway drug of the very 70s form of urban terrorism. Soon Aram
finds himself clutching a detonator, waiting to blow up the Turkish
ambassador to France.
It’s
here that Guédiguian’s takes a significant detour into more complex
moral discussion. As Aram is about to push the button, a random cyclist
pulls up behind the ambassador’s car; Aram makes the choice to set off
the bomb anyway. The cyclist, called Gilles, is not killed, but severely
enough injured to require months of operations and be largely confined
to a wheelchair. (*) Aram disappears to Beirut, there to join up with
like-minded urban guerrillas and continue the campaign of terror; but
racked with guilt, Anouch tracks Gilles down and offers him the family’s
help, as a kind of penance. Gilles, angry and bitter, takes up the
offer; after practically moving into Aram’s old bedroom, he starts to
take on and identify with the Armenian cause. Meanwhile, over in Beirut,
Aram swiftly becomes disillusioned with his commander’s callousness
towards innocent bystanders – as Gilles once was – but can’t quite bring
himself to quit for a more principled splinter group to stay with his
lover, Anahit.
All this makes for a meaty two-hour-plus drama, with Guédiguian
sketching in the moral dilemmas with clarity and firmness. The central
debate is rehearsed again and again: can innocents ever be sacrificed
for a cause, however urgent? Some of the dialogue is a little
decks-clearing – Ascaride at one point quickly explains that “most
Armenians abhor violence” – while the largely studio-bound sets make the
film feel a little airless. It’s only when we get to Armenia in the
final frames that the horizons open up. Guédiguian, none the less, has
something interesting to say; his film is always good, if it’s not quite
brilliant.
"The Guardian," May 21, 2015
-------------------------------------------------
(*) Guédiguian has declared to AFP that he was inspired by "the story of a Spaniard" accidentally wounded in Madrid at the beginning of the 1980s by a bomb of Armenian activists. The reference is to Spanish journalist Jose Antonio Gurriaran, who was wounded in 1981 and wrote a book on his experience and his search to understand the Armenian plight, called "La Bomba" ("Armeniaca").
No comments:
Post a Comment