‘JOURNEY’ INTO ARMENIA HISTORY
By Jim Slotek
Sun Media
April 13, 2007
Not being Armenian, I’ve never given much thought to what it means
to be Armenian.
And after seeing French director Robert Guediguian’s heartfelt Journey
to Armenia, I’m no closer to understanding that inner feeling of
Armenian-ness.
This despite many lectures about Mount Ararat and the Armenian state
of mind that are heaped upon Anna (Ariane Ascaride), a proper French
woman of Armenian descent, who comes face to face with a culture she
never knew or cared about.
On the other hand, most of us having roots strong or tenuous in some
other place, we can at least understand what motivates Guediguian
(Marius Et Jeannette) in his odd filmic love-letter to his father’s
homeland.
Journey to Armenia opens in Marseilles with a young French woman named
Jeannette (Madeleine Guediguian) taking part in a traditional Armenian
folk dance. Shift to Jeannette’s grandfather Barsam (Marcel Bluwal)
receiving bad news about his heart from his doctor, who also happens
to be his daughter Anna (Ascaride, Guediguian’s real-life wife).
Though Anna is chilly toward the old man, ostensibly because of
the rough treatment she feels her late mother received from him,
she makes arrangements for possible life-saving surgery.
And then Barsam disappears. Perturbed, Anna (who unlike her daughter
has never expressed any interest in things Armenian) traces his steps
via the local Armenian community and follows him to the capital city
of Erevan.
And there she more or less falls into an Armenian rabbit-hole, carried
along on a course of events that have been apparently plotted out
for her.
Her "guide," the vaguely sinister Sarkis (Simon Abkarian) drives her to
her father’s small village and then leaves her to the mercies of the
locals, who also appear to be in on whatever’s going on. The role of
protector/guide then falls to an ex-soldier and patriot named Yervanth
(Gerard Meylan) who negotiates Anna’s way through faux pas and more
serious troubles, and is determined to nurture her ethnic rebirth
(frequently asking, in so many words, "Are you feeling Armenian yet?")
Anna is very, well, French about the whole thing, unimpressed and often
annoyed, and yet sympathetic. Her meandering voyage is complicated
when she attracts a travelling mate, a young woman named Schake who
supports her family by working as a stripper, and who is desperate
to have Anna sponsor her move to France.
Along with her general antipathy toward her native land, Schake has
another reason to leave — she’s run afoul of local gangsters who are
smuggling pharmaceuticals, leading to one of Journey to Armenia’s most
dissonant and incongruous scenes — in which Anna grabs someone’s
gun during an attack and shoots three thugs (turns out she used to
belong to a gun club).
Thus does Anna’s voyage dovetail with another’s. Both she and Schake
must come to understand this historically beleaguered country better
before the end of the movie. And it’s going to involve many more
images of (Turkish controlled) Mount Ararat, as well as didactic
dialogue invoking the 1915 genocide and the 1988 earthquake.
Armenian-ness, it turns out, comes to one as an epiphany — one you
non-Armenians may not actually experience as you watch Journey to
Armenia. But at least you’ll have painlessly learned a thing or two.
(This film is rated PG)
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