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Aug 31 2014
Venice Review: Fatih Akin’s ‘The Cut’ Starring Tahar Rahim
When Turkish-German auteur Fatih Akin pulled “The Cut” from the Cannes
slate citing “personal reasons,” the rumor mill went to work overtime.
Certainly, Cannes would have seemed like the natural home for the
filmmaker’s next opus, so if, as was suggested, he had not been
guaranteed the competition slot that his profile surely demanded, what
could the reason be? Politics? Pique? Some internecine beef we weren’t
aware of? Within all that gossip however, there was one possible
explanation that never really got much play: that the film would not
be very good. Akin’s previous films, including such terrific,
joltingly energetic, critically lauded and awarded titles as “Head-on”
and “The Edge of Heaven” (the first two in a thematic trilogy that
“The Cut” is mooted to complete), seemed to put that beyond the realm
of possibility. And in truth, it’s not not very good. It’s close to a
disaster.
The story (co-written by Akin and veteran screenwriter Mardik Martin)
can be briefly summarized as concerning Nazaret, an Armenian husband
and father of twin girls, who is drafted into World War I to perform
slave labor under the authority of brutal, venal Ottoman forces. His
brother is killed in front of him and Nazaret himself only spared
because the man tasked to slit his throat is so reluctant to kill that
he merely inflicts the titular cut, which knocks Nazaret out but
doesn’t kill him, though he wakes up mute. Surviving through instinct
and the odd act of kindness until the war’s end, Nazaret discovers
that his daughters are still alive and sets out on an epic odyssey to
find them. There are some nice shots of deserts, period-accurate
design, interesting locations, excellent costuming –the window
dressing is fine.
But the problems start the first time a character opens his mouth,
which is in the very first scene. The first exchange in the film,
between Nazaret the Armenian blacksmith (Tahar Rahim) and a pompous,
wealthy client, is conducted in English. So it’s one of those films in
which everyone speaks English with a different accent to indicate
their point of origin? Oh wait no, everyone except the Armenians
speaks their own language. It’s not wholly unprecedented, but here
this decision feels like a fundamental misstep from which our
engagement with the film never recovered, for several reasons.
For one, it’s clear that Akin is using this device as a shorthand to
elicit audience sympathy with the Armenians, in contrast to the
“foreign”-language-speaking “others.” This is politically
uncomfortable on a few levels, notably the tacit assumption that the
intended audience for this film is an English-speaking one, even
though a lot of the discourse in advance was about how the film would
be received in modern-day Turkey, where in certain situations, even
referring to the plight of the Armenians as a genocide can be a very
dangerous thing to do. Beyond that, our own self-conscious sensitivity
to issues of Western cultural imperialism created in us an oddly
guilty reaction to watching a film set in the Middle East in which
only the “good guys,” the victims of these atrocities, speak English.
Those are issues outside the film. The issues within go even deeper:
The dialogue is awful — stilted and dry, with the actors trying to to
wrestle naturalism into a non-native tongue rendered into colloquial
speech about as convincingly as Google Translate might. It can be
unintentionally comic, as with the tendency for people to talk in
declarative, impersonal sentences like a schoolteacher saying the
latest news on the war is “Horrible carnage! Many people dying!” Or it
can be over-literal, as when Nazaret is reunited with his brother’s
wife and she addresses him directly as “Brother-in-law” repeatedly. Or
it can be confusing, as when Nazaret comes to America and doesn’t
understand that English, or the fact that he writes in Armenian.
Whatever else, the effect is always distracting.
Furthermore, the story is bloated and episodic (the film’s 2h 18m
length doesn’t help the pacing), and remarkably unengaging for what
should be emotionally epic –at its end, there was hardly a wet eye in
house, and we’re easy criers (to be fair, we did come close during a
scene in which Chaplin’s “The Kid” plays, because… Chaplin’s “The
Kid”). To date, we’ve almost exclusively raved about Rahim, but here,
even when by virtue of being mute he doesn’t have to contend with the
dialogue, he seems lost in a role that mistakes screen time for
characterization (and however gray his hair, he does not look like the
father of 18 year-old twins). Potentially interesting, knotty
subplots, especially about religion, are picked up and dropped without
any real comment being made, and the occasional striking image of
bodies thrown into a well, or a hellish, Hieronymous Bosch-ish
Armenian refugee camp, just becomes so much backdrop for Rahim to
stumble through, anguished, on his way to the next setback.
Akin’s a director whose previous work we’ve admired enormously, and
“The Cut”‘s been high on our Most Anticipated lists since we first
heard about it. But part of his appeal has always been a kind of
rambunctious irreverence, like his iconoclastic use of music, and the
highly individual, raw authenticity he brought crackling to the
screen. But when it’s not awkward, “The Cut” is, of all things, staid,
and with a bland lead and uninspired execution it’s very very far from
the “Sergio Leone meets Charlie Chaplin” vibe that Akin teased.
Alexander Hacke’s score at times threatens to do something
interestingly anachronistic in its use of electric guitar, and Rainer
Klausman’s cinematography is handsome, but all else is folly:
grandiose, self-serious, and dull. But worst of all, it’s an
opportunity squandered: 2002’s “Ararat” aside, the world has waited a
long time for a major film that gets to the heart of one of the
worst-reported atrocities of the 20th Century. Guess we’re going to
have to wait a bit longer. [C-/D+]
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/venice-review-fatih-akins-the-cut-starring-tahar-rahim-20140831