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The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia)
May 27, 2005 Friday
Final Edition
Belly dancing with controversy: Actress plays a single Muslim woman
who goes to a public pool and meets a Christian man
by: Angela Baldassarre, Special to the Sun
While her husband, Atom Egoyan, was fending off bad press for his
latest movie at the Cannes film festival, actress Arsinee Khanjian
has been busy honing her own chops by promoting Ruba Nadda's feature
directorial debut, Sabah.
A Gemini and Genie Award-winning actress with dark and exotic
features, 47-year-old Khanjian not only has appeared in all of
Egoyan's films, but has starred in fare by some of the world's
bravest filmmakers, including Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat and
Michael Haneke.
In Sabah, Armenian-born Khanjian plays a 40-year-old single
Muslim-Arab woman who lives with her widowed mother (Um Mouham-med)
in a Toronto home. Sabah must answer to her older brother, Majid
(Jeff Seymour) who controls the family finances; but one day Sabah
decides to defy her familial duties and goes swimming to a public
pool where she meets and eventually falls in love with Stephen (Shawn
Doyle), a Christian man who is also divorced. And thus begins Sabah's
battle to transcend two divided cultures.
Baldassarre: You look so comfortable in this role.
Khanjian: It was written for me as I understood it. The first time
Ruba got in touch with me was three years ago. I received a script
through Atom's office where she knew where to find me. So she sent
the script with a letter saying 'I would love you to read this. I've
written it with you in mind and I'd love you to consider it.'
When I read that first draft, and since then it's gone through many
wonderful drafts, I was very excited about it, I thought it was a
very honest piece of work. It came from a real, very simple but
sincere place. It didn't have any sort of heavy undertones, major
socio-political analyses. It was a very true story of a particular
family and of a particular woman, one who was 40 years old. How often
do you see that on a screen today?
And she was presented as 40, not 40 looking like 20 or 30. I was
really excited about the script but then I started having concerns
about it.
What kind of concerns?
Maybe that's when I kinda politicized the premise. I started
wondering if I was the right person to play it, although I'm
completely familiar with the environment.
I come from the Middle East, I grew up in the Middle East. I was 17
when I left, so I had enough conscious understanding of what Arabic
culture is about, Middle Eastern culture is about. However, because I
am from Armenian background therefore there are still major
differences in terms of religion, Armenians being Christian and here
we were dealing with a family with Muslim values. I felt that maybe I
wasn't the right person to play the part given the climate of today
in terms of how the West is trying to figure out what Islam is about.
I had many discussions with Ruba wondering if she has thought about
that, if I were later to be in this situation where I would have to
talk about the film and the character and that family and that
situation. And she was incredibly at ease about it saying that 'what
you read in this script is my intense relationship with my own
culture and I think you're a good voice for it.'
Why is Sabah 40?
I asked Ruba 'why is she 40? You're a young woman?' She came up with
the most wonderful answer, saying probably because for a 40-year-old
it's more difficult to break away from your traditions especially if
those traditions have become the purpose of your life.
And to question yourself and be able to entitle yourself with those
rights which are absolutely basic individual rights, it makes it much
more interesting premise. That really made me trust the journey of
the character. From there on it was a particular journey because I
had never found myself in that situation so I didn't have any
first-hand pain of being completely isolated in terms of my family
functions.
It was very important for me to be truthful without making her this
kind of strange character from being completely inexistent to
suddenly breaking through. It was very important for me to give her a
journey, and each step of the journey was not necessarily a
confrontation with the outside world but with the world that she had
taken on in terms of her personality, her identity. We talked a lot
with Ruba about that. I felt that the only way that I could
understand her was in terms of her struggle to come out from her own
limitations as opposed to one that has been imposed on her.
Angela Baldassarre is a Toronto-based film writer.
GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: Arsinee Khanjian as Sabah, in the film by Ruba Nadda.;
Colour Photo: Shawn Doyle is the cabinetmaker to Arsinee Khanjian's
unmarried Muslim woman of 40 in Sabah.
May 27, 2005 Friday
Final Edition
Belly dancing with controversy: Actress plays a single Muslim woman
who goes to a public pool and meets a Christian man
by: Angela Baldassarre, Special to the Sun
While her husband, Atom Egoyan, was fending off bad press for his
latest movie at the Cannes film festival, actress Arsinee Khanjian
has been busy honing her own chops by promoting Ruba Nadda's feature
directorial debut, Sabah.
A Gemini and Genie Award-winning actress with dark and exotic
features, 47-year-old Khanjian not only has appeared in all of
Egoyan's films, but has starred in fare by some of the world's
bravest filmmakers, including Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat and
Michael Haneke.
In Sabah, Armenian-born Khanjian plays a 40-year-old single
Muslim-Arab woman who lives with her widowed mother (Um Mouham-med)
in a Toronto home. Sabah must answer to her older brother, Majid
(Jeff Seymour) who controls the family finances; but one day Sabah
decides to defy her familial duties and goes swimming to a public
pool where she meets and eventually falls in love with Stephen (Shawn
Doyle), a Christian man who is also divorced. And thus begins Sabah's
battle to transcend two divided cultures.
Baldassarre: You look so comfortable in this role.
Khanjian: It was written for me as I understood it. The first time
Ruba got in touch with me was three years ago. I received a script
through Atom's office where she knew where to find me. So she sent
the script with a letter saying 'I would love you to read this. I've
written it with you in mind and I'd love you to consider it.'
When I read that first draft, and since then it's gone through many
wonderful drafts, I was very excited about it, I thought it was a
very honest piece of work. It came from a real, very simple but
sincere place. It didn't have any sort of heavy undertones, major
socio-political analyses. It was a very true story of a particular
family and of a particular woman, one who was 40 years old. How often
do you see that on a screen today?
And she was presented as 40, not 40 looking like 20 or 30. I was
really excited about the script but then I started having concerns
about it.
What kind of concerns?
Maybe that's when I kinda politicized the premise. I started
wondering if I was the right person to play it, although I'm
completely familiar with the environment.
I come from the Middle East, I grew up in the Middle East. I was 17
when I left, so I had enough conscious understanding of what Arabic
culture is about, Middle Eastern culture is about. However, because I
am from Armenian background therefore there are still major
differences in terms of religion, Armenians being Christian and here
we were dealing with a family with Muslim values. I felt that maybe I
wasn't the right person to play the part given the climate of today
in terms of how the West is trying to figure out what Islam is about.
I had many discussions with Ruba wondering if she has thought about
that, if I were later to be in this situation where I would have to
talk about the film and the character and that family and that
situation. And she was incredibly at ease about it saying that 'what
you read in this script is my intense relationship with my own
culture and I think you're a good voice for it.'
Why is Sabah 40?
I asked Ruba 'why is she 40? You're a young woman?' She came up with
the most wonderful answer, saying probably because for a 40-year-old
it's more difficult to break away from your traditions especially if
those traditions have become the purpose of your life.
And to question yourself and be able to entitle yourself with those
rights which are absolutely basic individual rights, it makes it much
more interesting premise. That really made me trust the journey of
the character. From there on it was a particular journey because I
had never found myself in that situation so I didn't have any
first-hand pain of being completely isolated in terms of my family
functions.
It was very important for me to be truthful without making her this
kind of strange character from being completely inexistent to
suddenly breaking through. It was very important for me to give her a
journey, and each step of the journey was not necessarily a
confrontation with the outside world but with the world that she had
taken on in terms of her personality, her identity. We talked a lot
with Ruba about that. I felt that the only way that I could
understand her was in terms of her struggle to come out from her own
limitations as opposed to one that has been imposed on her.
Angela Baldassarre is a Toronto-based film writer.
GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: Arsinee Khanjian as Sabah, in the film by Ruba Nadda.;
Colour Photo: Shawn Doyle is the cabinetmaker to Arsinee Khanjian's
unmarried Muslim woman of 40 in Sabah.