The Art Desk, UK
Oct 11 2014

LFF 2014: The Cut

The Armenian genocide sends Tahir Rahim on an epic quest

There have been pitifully few films about the Ottoman Turks’ genocide
of 1.5 million Armenians in World War One, surely thanks to the
strategic usefulness of a modern Turkey which denies the genocide’s
existence. Fatih Akin, the fierce German-Turkish director of Head On,
doesn’t limit The Cut to its direct horrors either, preferring to
sweep away his hero Nazaret (Tahir Rahim) on wider historical
currents. Compared to Akin’s early work, this is a populist,
widescreen, English-language epic.

Nazaret is quickly torn from his happy family in a nervous Armenian
community, to be used as slave-labour while death-marchers pass him in
the baking desert, and left for dead himself after the cut of the
title, which renders him mute as the slave-workers’ throats are
slashed, to save Turkish bullets. A well filled with bloated white
corpses and a ragged tent-city of Armenians with bodies bruised black
by starvation and heat – such images linger. But so does the way
Rahim’s silent, brutalised man glows at a screening of Chaplin’s
silent The Kid on a village wall, the Little Tramp’s triumph over
injustice resonating deeply.

The quest to find his daughters after the Ottomans’ defeat takes
Nazaret to newly created Lebanon, Cuba, and across the USA. He finds
humble kindness and savage cruelty everywhere. Genocide seems almost
as inherent to mankind’s possible nature as love. Rahim’s open,
charismatic face carries us along with everything he sees and can’t
say. If The Cut is soft-hearted and prosaic at times, it’s also
successfully ambitious in the scope of its picaresque narrative, and
its breadth of humanity.

[LFF=London Film Festival]

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress