The Ottoman Lieutenant movie review: erasing the past with sleight of cinematic hand

MaryAnn Johanson

“In a land on the brink of war,” goes the marketing tagline of the odious The Ottoman Lieutenant, “the most dangerous place to be is in love.” That would not be true in, shall we say, the best of wars, if there is such a thing. But here, young American nurse Lillie (Hera Hilmar: Anna Karenina), volunteering at a hospital in a remote region of the Ottoman Empire, finds herself in the middle of World War I and the genocide of Armenians by the Turks. Except the latter is not happening here at all! This propagandistic production, financed primarily from Turkey — the government of which has a longstanding policy of denying that any genocide upon Armenians was ever committed — would like us to believe that 1.5 million Armenians were not exterminated with deliberate precision by the Ottoman Empire, but that it was just war and, you know, people die. *shrug*

The Ottoman Lieutenant

Glenn Kenny

It is probably no accident that the title of this film uses a verbal pattern identical to that of “The English Patient,” that is, definite article, adjective (a specific kind of adjective, actually—a demonym), descriptive noun. Like “The English Patient,” “The Ottoman Lieutenant” is a tale of war and of love torn apart by war. The simple title has an air of mystery too it, whether you understand “Ottoman” to refer to a member of a disbanded empire or to a padded stool.

Poorly Acted ‘Ottoman Lieutenant’ Also Glosses Over Genocide

Richard Roeper

The most objectionable thing about “The Ottoman Lieutenant” isn’t the flat acting or the cliché of a wartime romance triangle or the cheap and schmaltzy score.

It’s the revisionist history of the Armenian Genocide.

Set mostly in and around the Anatolia region of Turkey during World War I, “The Ottoman Lieutenant” almost completely glosses over the Empire’s systematic elimination of some 1.5 million Armenians, including women, children, the elderly and the infirm — an epic-scale atrocity the Turkish government denies to this day.