The Promise
Terry George (2016)
The Promise is an old-fashioned love-in-wartime drama in several ways. The principals are all top of their class – Mikael Boghosian (Oscar Isaac) is a brilliant medical student, Ana Khesarian (Charlotte Le Bon) a gifted dance teacher, Chris Myers (Christian Bale) a world-renowned journalist. The plotting is sometimes highly improbable but consistent in the criterion applied to decide whether a character survives: the star status of the actor concerned. Both Mikael and Chris are in love with Ana; she has feelings for both of them (though she prefers Mikael). How will the eternal triangle be resolved – to put it another way, how does the film choose between Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale? The solution: Charlotte Le Bon, who isn’t as a big a name as either of them, must eventually drown, leaving the two heroes with an increased respect for each other, as well as further ennobled by their shared loss. All three main actors are good (as are others in the cast) and The Promise’s approach is fine for an audience that prefers a love story to a war movie (an audience that includes me). It’s nonetheless impossible to ignore Terry George’s celebrity-partiality – and how uneasily this sits with the film’s serious political pretensions.
George’s story, centred on the Ottoman government’s systematic extermination of the Armenian population in 1915 and subsequently, is set in the same ethnic and geographical territory as Fatih Akin’s The Cut (2014). Mikael is an apothecary in the Armenian village of Sirun. He dreams of becoming a doctor. He promises himself to Maral (Angela Sarafyan), the daughter of a wealthy local man, in exchange for a dowry of four hundred gold coins, which will finance Mikael’s medical studes in Constantinople. On arrival in the big city, he meets Ana, who teaches the young daughters of Mikael’s uncle (Igal Naor) and his wife (Alicia Borrachero). Ana too is Armenian by birth but lived for some years in Paris, where her relationship with Chris Myers, an American reporter for Associated Press, began. Mikael also strikes up a friendship with Emre (Marwan Kenzari), a fellow medical student and the son of a high-ranking Turkish official. On the outbreak of World War I, Mikael, with Emre’s help, avoids conscription in the Ottoman army through a medical student exemption. In April 1915, the Ottoman authorities round up Armenian community leaders and intellectuals, before deporting them from Constantinople. Mikael, in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent his uncle’s imprisonment, is himself arrested and sent to a prison labour camp.
By the time the film arrives in the camp, preferential treatment is already setting in. Whereas the prisoners played by extras are emaciated, Oscar Isaac and Tom Hollander simply have impressive facial hair growth. Hollander’s casting is curious though he supplies a taking cameo, as a prisoner who was a circus clown in peacetime. It has to be a cameo: Hollander, not an international star, must blow himself up in an explosion that helps Oscar Isaac escape from the camp and find his way back to Sirun. I won’t go into the details of what happens next. Suffice to say that Terry George gets Ana and Chris into the vicinity; the inconvenient Maral killed, along with nearly all the other inhabitants of Sirun, by Turkish troops; and himself into a position where he can concentrate on the big three in the story.
I’m labouring the point but The Promise’s tactics are not only transparent but finally objectionable. (They seem to be proving counterproductive too: the film, a fortnight after its US opening, hasn’t recouped a tenth of its $90m budget.) Mikael explains in voiceover that he emigrated to America and settled there with one of his uncle’s now orphaned daughters, whom Mikael adopted. The film ends with her wedding reception, at Mikael’s Massachusetts home, in the early 1940s. The guests include other Armenians who also escaped the Turkish genocide and to the States. Terry George then puts up on screen the words of William Saroyan, one of the most famous of all Armenian Americans:
‘Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.’
After more than two hours of brazen winnowing of the cast, the implication that The Promise has been a serious account of the Armenian Holocaust is a bit much.
The dialogue in Terry George and Robin Swicord’s screenplay is often creaky, especially when it tries to move the action forward, but better in some of the more intimate exchanges between characters, which George also directs with a surer touch than the warfare set pieces. The film is handsome and occasional beautiful to look at, although Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography isn’t particularly dynamic. Gabriel Yared’s score does a decent job of combining the romantic and epic strains of the story.
Since he played that ethnic conundrum Llewyn Davis, Oscar Isaac has become the go-to man for exoticismo. You can see why: Bryan Singer, who directed Isaac in X-Men: Apocalypse last year, made an odd choice of words but wasn’t wrong when he told Rolling Stone that the actor’s ‘facial structure embodies a global human’. Isaac can play clear-cut Americans too but he seems to use his air of foreignness to substantiate the shadow side of such men, as in Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Isaac’s performance in the latter is, I think, his best so far but he’s often very effective in The Promise. He’s just right as the shy but determined newcomer to student and metropolitan life, and has a lovely tact and humour in Mikael’s early scenes with Ana. Once the narrative switches into conventional survival drama, Isaac’s opportunities are more limited but I found myself rooting for his character here more than in his other starring roles to date.
There’s a quiet but real chemistry between Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon. I’d not seen this French-Canadian actress before but I liked her. Mikael’s mother Marta (Shohreh Agdashloo), who knows her son fell in love in Constantinople and doesn’t want to jeopardise his marriage to Maral, lies to Ana that Mikael is dead. Charlotte Le Bon absorbs and conceals the shock very well (Ana has to hide her true feelings from Chris Myers, who’s also present, as well as Marta). She’s even better when Mikael turns up: Ana looks at him as if he really has come back from the dead. Christian Bale, as the volatile, fearless Myers, brings a welcome cussed edge to proceedings but he’s also surprisingly touching in expressing the man’s honourableness and vulnerability. When they first meet in the lecture theatre and Mikael declares that medicine is his passion, Emre replies that his is female anatomy: this hedonistic Jack the Lad is there only because his father gave him a simple choice – either a medical or a military career. But by the time Chris Myers is arrested by the Ottoman authorities for spying, it’s Emre who, with the US Ambassador (James Cromwell), saves the journalist’s skin – at the cost of his own: the young man is executed by firing squad. Marwan Kenzari, who’s Dutch-Tunisian, does an excellent job – in the unsubtle circumstances, a remarkably natural job – of delineating Emre’s discovery that life is no laughing matter.
5 May 2017