Fatih Akin (2014)

This is only the second non-documentary feature made by Fatih Akin since The Edge of Heaven (2007).  In addition to the comedy Soul Kitchen (2009), Akin contributed an episode to New York, I Love You (2008), an anthology involving eleven directors, and made the documentary Polluting Paradise in 2012.  (I’ve seen none of these.)  The Edge of Heaven is a great film about people striving to overcome different kinds of estrangement – caused by fallings out, national borders, death – in order to be reunited or reconciled with family members.  In The Cut a young husband and father is separated from his wife and twin daughters in 1915:  he spends years and crosses continents trying to find his children.  Their themes may be superficially similar but Akin’s new film has little in common with The Edge of Heaven in terms of complexity and subtlety.  The Cut is a disappointment and it’s soon clear that it’s not going to work.   Much of the film is in English, even though few of its cast are native English speakers; Akin joins the distinguished list of film artists who don’t ‘hear’ so well when their actors are reading lines in a language that is not the director’s own.  But the shortcomings of The Cut go much deeper than that.

Nazaret Manoogian is an Armenian, a blacksmith in the town of Mardin, now in Turkey but, at the outbreak of the First World War, part of the Ottoman Empire.  During the war years, the Ottoman government systematically expelled members of the minority Armenian community from their historic homeland; in what is now known as the ‘Armenian genocide’, many of the able-bodied male population were either murdered or died as army conscripts subjected to forced labour in appalling conditions.  Women and children, the elderly and the infirm were deported on ‘death marches’.  Nazaret is conscripted and, for much of the period of the Great War, labours on a work gang in the Mesopotamian desert.  Some members of the group die in the arduous conditions; others agree to renounce their Christianity and convert to Islam in exchange for the offer of freedom.  Of the remainder, Nazaret is the sole survivor of a massacre carried out by civilian prisoners on Ottoman military orders.  His companions’ throats are cut.  The man meant to kill Nazaret can’t bring himself to do so, although he does stab him in the neck and renders Nazaret mute as a result of the injury.  After further travails in the desert, during which he rails at and rejects God, Nazaret is given refuge by Omar Nasreddin, a soap merchant in Aleppo, whose premises eventually become a virtual refugee camp for displaced Armenians.  It’s here that Nazaret learns that, although his wife died on a death march, his twin daughters survived.  This is the start of his search for the girls, a search that takes him to many orphanages, then across the Atlantic – to Cuba, to Minneapolis and eventually to North Dakota.  There, in the mid-1920s, he’s reunited with one of his daughters, the other having died a few months previously.

The London Film Festival catalogue not unexpectedly introduces The Cut as a film concerned with the Armenian genocide.  The genocide remains a highly controversial subject and an atrocity that some, not least in Turkey, continue to deny.  You don’t doubt its importance to Akin, born in Germany of Turkish parents, but The Cut, which he wrote with Mardik Martin (best known as the co-author of New York, New York and Raging Bull), is a verging-on-generic story – of a man whom war has separated from loved ones and who will give his all to find them again.  Nazaret’s travels allow Akin and his cinematographer Rainer Klausmann to create some fine images of various peopleless landscapes but these amount to no more than physical context and the particular circumstances that have caused the break-up of the family are merely background to a familiar central quest.  In the wartime part of the story, Akin shows little talent for marshalling crowds or even smaller numbers of people:  the Armenian prisoners in the desert often resemble a tableau and not a very vivant one – they give the impression of lining up for a group photograph.  What are clearly meant to be especially powerful moments, such as the apostasy of Nazaret’s fellow prisoners, are weak:  thanks not only to the standard issue expressions of disgust (‘You dogs …  you Judases … may you burn in hell!’) but also to the flat-footed staging.

The lack of dynamism in these desert sequences – the fact that they look (poorly) choreographed and convey no sense of violent disorder, of things happening unaccountably – draws attention to the artificiality of the hero’s survival against the odds.  You accept that this is necessary, of course, but Tahar Rahim’s Nazaret, even in the work gang, always looks a man apart.  Later on, in Aleppo, Nazaret watches a screening of The Kid with a large audience of other refugees:  Nazaret laughs then cries at the separation of Chaplin and the little boy – there’s no suggestion at all that the plot of The Kid might be resonant for others in the audience.  Akin must see it as important that Nazaret loses the power of speech:  it’s possible that this is meant to be symbolic of an idea that the Armenian genocide has continued to be hushed up but it doesn’t pay dividends – except in one of the film’s few amusing moments when, in the soap works, Nazaret is asked questions by one of Omar Nasreddin’s employees and writes an answer on a tablet of soap, only to be told by this other man that he can’t read.  Tahar Rahim holds your attention but he’s an actor who thrives on interaction with others and there’s little scope for that in such a mechanical plot; nor, in spite of Nazaret’s globetrotting, is Rahim given any opportunity to do what he’s proved so good at doing in earlier films – realising a character who has to adapt to new situations and who turns them to his advantage.  Nazaret’s commitment to finding his daughters is so fundamental and unwavering that Rahim is also denied the chance to show hope building and withering and growing again.  He has a wonderful moment when Nazaret first encounters Omar Nasreddin in the desert, the merchant asks if he’s Armenian and the young man’s face reflects his dilemma:  if Nazaret nods his head, will he be seizing a chance of survival or condemning himself to death?  Otherwise, though, Rahim’s acting here isn’t in the same league as his work in A Prophet or Free Men or The Past or Grand Central. 

 The Edge of Heaven involved collisions between people (or near-misses) which, although they may have been improbable, were integral not just to the story but to the themes of the film.  You fully accepted these coincidences.   In The Cut, people reappear purely for ironic effect or in order to move the plot forward:  in the opening scene, Nazaret is congratulated by a customer on a piece of smithing work he’s done and we’re introduced to Nazaret’s apprentice.  The customer bumps into Nazaret when the latter is wandering in the desert; it’s the apprentice who turns up in Aleppo to tell Nazaret that his daughters have survived.  In Havana, the kindly barber who gives him lodging and explains that the girls have moved to Minneapolis also helps buy Nazaret passage to the US.  Good marriages to Cubans had been arranged for both daughters but one of the prospective husbands rejected his bride because of her limp (a physical disability inherited from the privations of the death march) and the other twin refused to go ahead with her own marriage and thereby leave her sister alone.  The barber’s wife points out to Nazaret the man who rejected his daughter; Nazaret beats the man up and steals from him enough money to pay his own way to Florida.  As the boat bound for there is about to leave, the barber says to him, ‘By the way, I forgot to ask – where did you get the money from?’  They then exchange a significant look and the barber says ‘May God bless you …’ as Nazaret sails away.  By this stage, Akin seems to be going through the motions and the final stages of the story lose what little credibility remains.  Nazaret, after being nearly beaten to death by a group of malignant Irish navvies, gets up and walks along a railway track into Ruso, North Dakota.  The first person he sees there, coming out of a house, is a limping woman.  It can’t be … but it is.  In his attempts to attract her attention, Nazaret even briefly recovers enough voice to make his daughter hear him call.  It’s really sad that The Cut, inspired by events which matter personally to the man who made it, becomes such an impersonal and phony piece of work but I hope Akin’s failure with this kind of ‘international’ project is enough to send him back to the sort of films with which he made his name – films which are smaller scale than The Cut only in logistical terms and infinitely richer in the things that matter.   The large cast includes Simon Abkarian, Makram Khoury, Trine Dyrholm and Lara Heller.  The ambitious, overly dominant score is by Alexander Hacke.

12 October 2014