While several films open every year chronicle the multiple facets of the European Jewish experience of World War II, there’s only a select few about the Armenian Genocide, ranging from 1919’s Ravishing Armenia to Fatih Akin’s The Cut. 1915, the latest entry, written and directed by Garin Hovannisian and Alec Mouhibian, adds mystery as its contained largely within the Los Angeles Theatre. With provocative direction, they take the subject on with the intention of crafting a serious, harrowing one-night only performance. Haunted by the text, Simon (Simon Abkarian) and his young wife Angela (Angela Sarafyan) struggle to separate their own lives while mystery exists (although students of Egoyan will see it coming) that correlates to the text of the play. The central point of controversy surrounding the play is the decision of her character, an Armenian mother, to leave with a Turkish soldier. He’s played by Sam Page as a hot-shot Hollywood actor slumming it in the theatre for personal and professional reasons.
The emotional core of the film is deep and the story is ambitious and often haunting. The gravity of the controversy though outweighs its effect, as the story delves into soap opera-esque passages that feel as if they are one cliché after another. In the spirit of Egoyan, as well as other reflective works of theater on screen (such as Roman Polanski’s hypnotic Venus in Fur), its attempt to resurrect the ghosts of the past is perhaps too on the nose. It’s aware of what it is doing and unfortunately the mystery is lost in a picture that at 82 minutes seems to rush important and intriguing revelations, including the presence of a mysterious Times reporter with an agenda.
The controversy at the core recalls the climax of Able Ferrara’s messy yet fascinating Mary, while 1915’s politics are mostly personal, at least for its obsessive director Simon. The process on display here is fascinating although its study of performance, in the face of difficult situations, is unfortunately trampled by a screenplay that reveals too much, too quickly.
A Canadian of Armenian decent, Egoyan had dealt with the question of Armenian-Canadian identity in his early pictures Next of Kin, and in his most reflexive picture, Calendar. Later in his career he had been encouraged by his producer, Robert Santos, to make the an epic in the vein of Schindler’s List exploring the Armenian Genocide. Finding this task difficult to do, he made a reflexive film about the difficulties of making a historic epic depicting the genocide, Ararat, which explored the emotional impacts of such undertaking. 1915 is a lessor effort in the same spirit; despite its faults these films ought to be made and more frequently. There is a certain emotional honest of stumbling in the dark, attempting to create work about a subject that remains controversial and difficult to discuss today. 1915 ends on a note of optimism that I imagine may inspire controversy as Simon finds closure — perhaps 1915 suffers from simplifying the complex and opaque. While it’s not quite an effective picture due to a screenplay that could have used more development, it underscores the difficulty of making work about this period in time, free from the projections and anxieties of the present.
1915 opens in Los Angeles on April 17th and in New York and VOD in April 22.