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Hollywood Reporter
Aug 31 2014
'The Cut': Venice Review
4:25 AM PDT 8/31/2014 by Boyd van Hoeij
The Bottom Line
An Armenian blacksmith can't speak and doesn't seem to have all that much to say
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Tahar Rahim
Director: Fatih Akin
Turkish-German director Fatih Akin completes his 'Love, Death and the
Devil' trilogy with this drama starring French actor Tahar Rahim ('A
Prophet')
VENICE -- A mute blacksmith father goes on a trip across the
continents in search of his daughters in The Cut, an ambitious but
only intermittently stirring historical epic from Turkish-German
director Fatih Akin. It's pretty remarkable that a director of Turkish
origins has decided to tell a story that starts in the 1915 Ottoman
Empire and in which an Armenian plays the lead, since that is the year
the oft-denied genocide of the Armenians took place. But the narrative
continues through 1923, pushing the fate of a people into the
background for a rather generic search-and-survival story.
The third segment of the director's Love, Death and the Devil trilogy,
after the acclaimed Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, this will generate
a decidedly more mixed response. However, the film has been presold in
many territories, with a staggering 10 countries alone represented on
the seemingly endless list of co-producers.
Nazaret Manoogian (French actor Tahar Rahim, from A Prophet) is a
blacksmith in Mardin, a town in present-day Turkey near the border
with Syria. His wife (Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra) and two young
children, the twins Lucinee and Arsinee (Dina and Zein Fakhoury), are
separated from him when the Ottomans join WWI and Nazar, like all
Armenian men, is drafted and ends up being forced to work as a road
builder in the desert.
The entire crew of Armenian workers is executed by a gang of bandits
and mercenaries, though Nazar manages to survive because the thief
(Bartu Kucukcaglayan) that's supposed to slit his throat doesn't
really want to kill him, only making the titular cut on his neck.
Despite the fact that it's obviously a very calculated choice to have
an Ottoman/Turk show some basic human decency and thus save an
Armenian from becoming a victim of genocide, the two men's complex
rapport is believably sketched in just a few scenes. (That said, the
exact details of why the Armenians have to die remain rather vague.)
One of the best shots in the entire film is also part of this
sequence, as Nazaret, lying on the ground with his hands tied behind
his back, wakes up the next morning next to the lifeless body of one
of his co-workers. Since he's also lost his voice, apparently because
the cut damaged his vocal cords, Nazar can't do anything but nudge his
forehead against that of his dead fellow Armenian, a wordless gesture
that suggests respect, compassion and desperation all at once.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film contains only a few other moments
that are that expressive and touching, moments that are scattered
amidst long stretches in which Nazar is on the move and tries to
survive but in which barely anything that happens throws some new
light on what Nazar thinks or feels. After escaping certain death,
Manoogian has to hide his Armenian identity from Bedouins and the
inhabitants of Aleppo (now in Syria), where he ends up working for a
kind soap manufacturer (Palestinian-Israeli actor Makram J. Khoury).
When WWI ends in 1918, the Ottoman occupiers are violently chased out
of town by the angry locals, though Nazar stops throwing stones like
those around him when a young Turkish boy is hit.
He is also reminded of his children when watching an open-air
screening of Chaplin's The Kid, supposedly in 1921, right after the
film came out. It is after the screening, with his face still wet from
his tears, that Nazar learns that his daughters are still alive and
the film's odyssey structure really kicks in, as the protagonist has
to comb through Syria, Lebanon, Havana, Cuba, Florida, Minneapolis and
even the Great Plains in search of his daughters. Unintentionally, the
number of locales the mute father has to travel to becomes
increasingly comical, as each time he seems to have barely missed his
on-the-move daughters.
Akin was clearly aiming for an epic in the David Lean/Elia Kazan mold,
with possibly some touches of the more sweetly melodramatic side of
Chaplin because his protagonist can't speak. But exactly because the
main character literally loses his voice early on, the film doesn't
allow for easy audience identification. The script, co-written by the
director and Mardik Martin, the screenwriter of Armenian origins who
co-wrote Scorsese's Mean Streets and Raging Bull, concentrates too
much on Nazar's singular quest, namely surviving in order to find his
daughters, for other happenings or characters to register much during
the film's nonetheless almost epic, 138-minute running time.
There's also a language problem, as all the Armenian characters speak
accented (and occasionally clunky) English while the Ottomans, Arabs
and Cubans all speak their own languages (all of which this poor
artisan seems to understand without any problems). This would be an
acceptable choice if Nazar hadn't gone to the U.S., where everyone
also speaks English. This initially gives audiences the rather odd
impression that all Americans were fluent in Armenian in the early
1920s.
Rahim has a great face but isn't given enough opportunity to make it
clear to audiences what his character is going through beyond the most
basic emotions, especially after Nazaret loses his faculty of speech.
All other actors are bit players, with Moritz Bleibtreu and Trine
Dyrholm making cameo appearances as an industrialist and Christian nun
respectively.
The widescreen film's globe-trotting locations and sets, handsomely
designed by Allan Starski (Schindler's List, The Pianist), are often
captured by cinematographer Rainer Klausmann in wide shots that take
audiences from the desert to the Atlantic Ocean and finally to rural
North Dakota, with especially the influence of Westerns noticeable in
the compositions. And Akin's regular composer, Alexander Hacke, at
least avoids falling into the trap of copying the scores of the epics
of yesteryear, instead coming up with his own rocky, often
electric-guitar driven compositions.
Production companies: Bombero International, Pyramide Productions,
Pandora Film, Corazon International, NDR, ADR Degeto, France 3 Cinema,
Dorje Film, BIM Distribuzione, Mars Media Entertainment, Opus Film,
Jordan Films, Anadolu Kultur
Cast: Tahar Rahim, Simon Abkarian, Hindi Zahra, Makram J. Khoury,
Kevork Malikyan, Trine Dyrholm, Moritz Bleibtreu, Lara Heller
Director: Fatih Akin
Screenplay: Fatih Akin, Mardik Martin
Producer: Fatik Akin, Karl Baumgartner, Reinhard Brundig, Nurhan
Sekerci-Porst, Flaminio Zadra
Co-producers: Fabienne Vonier, Francis Boespflug, Alberto Fanni,
Valerio De Paolis, Ruben Dishdishyan, Aram Movsesyan, Laurette
Bourassa, Doug Steeden, Piotr Dzieciol, Ewa Puszczynska
Director of photography: Rainer Klausmann
Production designer: Allan Starski
Costume designer: Katrin Aschendorf
Editor: Andrew Bird
Music: Alexander Hacke
Sales: The Match Factory
No rating, 138 minutes
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/cut-venice-review-729277
Aug 31 2014
'The Cut': Venice Review
4:25 AM PDT 8/31/2014 by Boyd van Hoeij
The Bottom Line
An Armenian blacksmith can't speak and doesn't seem to have all that much to say
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Tahar Rahim
Director: Fatih Akin
Turkish-German director Fatih Akin completes his 'Love, Death and the
Devil' trilogy with this drama starring French actor Tahar Rahim ('A
Prophet')
VENICE -- A mute blacksmith father goes on a trip across the
continents in search of his daughters in The Cut, an ambitious but
only intermittently stirring historical epic from Turkish-German
director Fatih Akin. It's pretty remarkable that a director of Turkish
origins has decided to tell a story that starts in the 1915 Ottoman
Empire and in which an Armenian plays the lead, since that is the year
the oft-denied genocide of the Armenians took place. But the narrative
continues through 1923, pushing the fate of a people into the
background for a rather generic search-and-survival story.
The third segment of the director's Love, Death and the Devil trilogy,
after the acclaimed Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, this will generate
a decidedly more mixed response. However, the film has been presold in
many territories, with a staggering 10 countries alone represented on
the seemingly endless list of co-producers.
Nazaret Manoogian (French actor Tahar Rahim, from A Prophet) is a
blacksmith in Mardin, a town in present-day Turkey near the border
with Syria. His wife (Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra) and two young
children, the twins Lucinee and Arsinee (Dina and Zein Fakhoury), are
separated from him when the Ottomans join WWI and Nazar, like all
Armenian men, is drafted and ends up being forced to work as a road
builder in the desert.
The entire crew of Armenian workers is executed by a gang of bandits
and mercenaries, though Nazar manages to survive because the thief
(Bartu Kucukcaglayan) that's supposed to slit his throat doesn't
really want to kill him, only making the titular cut on his neck.
Despite the fact that it's obviously a very calculated choice to have
an Ottoman/Turk show some basic human decency and thus save an
Armenian from becoming a victim of genocide, the two men's complex
rapport is believably sketched in just a few scenes. (That said, the
exact details of why the Armenians have to die remain rather vague.)
One of the best shots in the entire film is also part of this
sequence, as Nazaret, lying on the ground with his hands tied behind
his back, wakes up the next morning next to the lifeless body of one
of his co-workers. Since he's also lost his voice, apparently because
the cut damaged his vocal cords, Nazar can't do anything but nudge his
forehead against that of his dead fellow Armenian, a wordless gesture
that suggests respect, compassion and desperation all at once.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film contains only a few other moments
that are that expressive and touching, moments that are scattered
amidst long stretches in which Nazar is on the move and tries to
survive but in which barely anything that happens throws some new
light on what Nazar thinks or feels. After escaping certain death,
Manoogian has to hide his Armenian identity from Bedouins and the
inhabitants of Aleppo (now in Syria), where he ends up working for a
kind soap manufacturer (Palestinian-Israeli actor Makram J. Khoury).
When WWI ends in 1918, the Ottoman occupiers are violently chased out
of town by the angry locals, though Nazar stops throwing stones like
those around him when a young Turkish boy is hit.
He is also reminded of his children when watching an open-air
screening of Chaplin's The Kid, supposedly in 1921, right after the
film came out. It is after the screening, with his face still wet from
his tears, that Nazar learns that his daughters are still alive and
the film's odyssey structure really kicks in, as the protagonist has
to comb through Syria, Lebanon, Havana, Cuba, Florida, Minneapolis and
even the Great Plains in search of his daughters. Unintentionally, the
number of locales the mute father has to travel to becomes
increasingly comical, as each time he seems to have barely missed his
on-the-move daughters.
Akin was clearly aiming for an epic in the David Lean/Elia Kazan mold,
with possibly some touches of the more sweetly melodramatic side of
Chaplin because his protagonist can't speak. But exactly because the
main character literally loses his voice early on, the film doesn't
allow for easy audience identification. The script, co-written by the
director and Mardik Martin, the screenwriter of Armenian origins who
co-wrote Scorsese's Mean Streets and Raging Bull, concentrates too
much on Nazar's singular quest, namely surviving in order to find his
daughters, for other happenings or characters to register much during
the film's nonetheless almost epic, 138-minute running time.
There's also a language problem, as all the Armenian characters speak
accented (and occasionally clunky) English while the Ottomans, Arabs
and Cubans all speak their own languages (all of which this poor
artisan seems to understand without any problems). This would be an
acceptable choice if Nazar hadn't gone to the U.S., where everyone
also speaks English. This initially gives audiences the rather odd
impression that all Americans were fluent in Armenian in the early
1920s.
Rahim has a great face but isn't given enough opportunity to make it
clear to audiences what his character is going through beyond the most
basic emotions, especially after Nazaret loses his faculty of speech.
All other actors are bit players, with Moritz Bleibtreu and Trine
Dyrholm making cameo appearances as an industrialist and Christian nun
respectively.
The widescreen film's globe-trotting locations and sets, handsomely
designed by Allan Starski (Schindler's List, The Pianist), are often
captured by cinematographer Rainer Klausmann in wide shots that take
audiences from the desert to the Atlantic Ocean and finally to rural
North Dakota, with especially the influence of Westerns noticeable in
the compositions. And Akin's regular composer, Alexander Hacke, at
least avoids falling into the trap of copying the scores of the epics
of yesteryear, instead coming up with his own rocky, often
electric-guitar driven compositions.
Production companies: Bombero International, Pyramide Productions,
Pandora Film, Corazon International, NDR, ADR Degeto, France 3 Cinema,
Dorje Film, BIM Distribuzione, Mars Media Entertainment, Opus Film,
Jordan Films, Anadolu Kultur
Cast: Tahar Rahim, Simon Abkarian, Hindi Zahra, Makram J. Khoury,
Kevork Malikyan, Trine Dyrholm, Moritz Bleibtreu, Lara Heller
Director: Fatih Akin
Screenplay: Fatih Akin, Mardik Martin
Producer: Fatik Akin, Karl Baumgartner, Reinhard Brundig, Nurhan
Sekerci-Porst, Flaminio Zadra
Co-producers: Fabienne Vonier, Francis Boespflug, Alberto Fanni,
Valerio De Paolis, Ruben Dishdishyan, Aram Movsesyan, Laurette
Bourassa, Doug Steeden, Piotr Dzieciol, Ewa Puszczynska
Director of photography: Rainer Klausmann
Production designer: Allan Starski
Costume designer: Katrin Aschendorf
Editor: Andrew Bird
Music: Alexander Hacke
Sales: The Match Factory
No rating, 138 minutes
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/cut-venice-review-729277