Armenia genocide Promise falters
Print Edition
THE Armenian Genocide is a curiously unexplored moment in our modern history, cinematically speaking.
That alone makes director and co-writer Terry George’s “The Promise” intriguing.
Historical fiction generally has it over documentaries in inspiring mass interest, especially when actors as appealing as Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale and Charlotte Le Bon are involved.
Indeed, “The Promise” is a sprawling, handsome epic about the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey ad the Ottoman empire crumbled a century ago.
But despite the best intentions, the film fails to explain and context what led to a pogrom that Turkey to this day denies, and why it escalated as it did.
Instead, “The Promise” chooses to focus on an unsympathetic love triangle that manages to trivialize the theme.
The goal, as always, is to personalize events that are too big and too devastating to look at as a whole — to make it about the lives interrupted, cut short and thrown into turmoil by external forces.
Thus we’re given the character Michael Boghosian (Isaac), an Armenian medical student from a small village in southern Turkey who uses his fiance’s dowry to study modern medicine in Constantinople (Istanbul).
Michael isn’t in love with his fiance (Angela Sarafyan), but such is life in Siroun, where marriages are arranged and he doesn’t have a choice.
He kisses her goodbye and heads off to the big city, promising to return in just a few years.
Constantinople is an cauldron of temptation for Michael, who essentially falls for the first woman he sees.
The beguiling Ana (Le Bon) is a cosmopolitan beauty and intellectual. She lived in Paris for years. She exudes ethereal confidence. And she’s an Armenian from near his hometown.
Ana also happens to be in a long-term relationship with Chris Myers (Bale), an Associated Press reporter, who we’re told drinks too much.
While Michael is enjoying the city life and lusting after Ana, though, things are devolving around him. It’s 1914 and vague signs of war are emerging.
Things go on as normal for a little while — there are German soldiers at the parties now and battleships in the harbor and a heightened sense that some Turks are anti-Armenian.
And then Constantinople’s Armenian intellectuals start getting arrested and taken away. To where is unclear.
To fight? To prison camps? To be executed?
The intention, likely, is to put the viewer on the blurry ground level with Michael and Ana, who see their world turned upside down so suddenly that of course there would be confusion.
It’s unfair to critique such an utterly sincere film that does contain some riveting action and acting and even might inspire some to learn more about this moment in history.
But unfortunately, the story just doesn’t live up to its grand ambitions.
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