Battle Over 2 Films Reflects Turkey’s Quest to Control a Bitter History

Cara Buckley

If history was any guide, the director Terry George figured there’d be weirdness around his new film, “The Promise,” about the Armenian genocide. Sure enough, he was right.

One of the actors, Daniel Giménez Cacho, said he was contacted before filming by a Turkish ambassador. In line with Turkey’s official stance, the diplomat insisted that the genocide, in which nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed, had never occurred. After the movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, it racked up 55,000 lowly one-star votes on the Internet Movie Database, which is quite something, considering only a few thousand people had actually seen it at the three public screenings.

And then, six weeks before “The Promise” hit theaters this weekend came another film that shared uncanny parallels. Like “The Promise,” “The Ottoman Lieutenant” hinges on a love triangle set in Turkey during the early days of World War I. Unlike “The Promise,” “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” which stars Michiel Huisman and Josh Hartnett, was backed by Turkish investors and has been pilloried by critics for whitewashing historical events.

Hollywood's New Armenian Genocide Denial Epic

Michael Daly

 

Ben Kingsley and Josh Hartnett and Hera Hilmar surely would not have signed on to star in The Ottoman Lieutenant if they even imagined they would be parties to genocide denial.

And screenwriter Jeff Stockwell—who is by every indication a very decent person—says that everybody he spoke to in connection with the making of The Ottoman Lieutenant was aware of the Turkish government’s longtime denial of responsibility for the deliberate murder of 1.6 million innocent Armenians.

“The desire to be sure we were not supporting that denial weighed on me and everyone else I talked to who was hired on to the project—so much so that the climax of the film is built around the leads interrupting a death march,” Stockwell said in an email to The Daily Beast.

The movie—which came out in March and is reported by the website Box Office Mojo to have taken in less than $250,000 in American theaters despite its big-name cast—indeed has a scene where Turkish soldiers are herding Armenian civilians on a death march, complete with summary executions.

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.