Historic burdens

I rented Egoyan's Ararat last week and watched it yesterday. I wish Egoyan had made that film differently. I love Egoyan's works, especially The Calendar. In my opinion, The Calendar is Egoyan’s best work. He is a great writer and a great artist. But with Ararat, he stepped on a ground full of politics and historic arguments which is the biggest distraction for an artist from their art. And by saying that I don't mean, artists should not care abut politics. I believe the most political artists of past and present time are those who reflect the politically incorrectness of human being in general in their art regardless of artist’s personal bonding, in which this case is nationalism. I am neither a Turk nor an Armenian and I am not writing this entry to deny the 1915 Armenian genocide by Turks. I look at it as another act of barbarism against human beings. It moves me as much as the Rwanda genocide moves me or the Bosnia ethnic cleansing does.
However, since Mr. Egoyan is a very powerful story teller, he has implanted few beautiful twists into the story which made me curious to get to the ending point. The story is told in bits and pieces, with a wonderfully designed structure of events, characters and places. But yet, at the end I found the film very sentimental. Egoyan, in his official website says At the press conference for The Sweet Hereafter at Cannes in 1997, a journalist asked me if the film couldn't be seen as a metaphor for the Armenian Genocide. It was one of the few times in my life when I found myself quite speechless. The journalist went on to suggest that many of my films had dealt with themes of denial and its consequences, and was interested as to why I hadn't dealt with the subject more directly. What Egoyan has done in his previous films is that he has shown the consequences of that genocide in years after, in lives of Armenians today and I believe that is as political as an artist can get, otherwise he/she will get drawn in sentimentalism.

When I was watching the bonus material in DVD, I found all the deleted scenes very interesting, with the exception of one; the scene the homosexual father is reading his son his favorite book, yet I couldn't understand why he eliminated those scenes. Perhaps, he was concerned those scenes could distract the audience from the central story.