Edmonton Sun (Alberta)
July 13, 2007 Friday
FINAL EDITION

Journey into Armenian history

BY JIM SLOTEK, SUN MEDIA

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.