The Cut
Directed by: Fatih Akin
Written by: Fatih Akin and Mardik Martin
Starring: Tahar Rahim, Simon Abkarian, Makram Khoury, Hindi Zahra, Kevork Malikyan, Bartu Küçükçaglayan
Drama/History - 138 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 26 Oct 2015
Written by: Fatih Akin and Mardik Martin
Starring: Tahar Rahim, Simon Abkarian, Makram Khoury, Hindi Zahra, Kevork Malikyan, Bartu Küçükçaglayan
Drama/History - 138 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 26 Oct 2015
German-Turkish director Fatih Akin has a message for you. It is ok to examine long suppressed truths about the Armenian genocide in Turkey. This is not an Armenian or someone from the New World tackling the taboo, a subject one couldn’t even whisper about only a decade or so ago in Turkey. This is a Turk breathing life into history deliberately shrouded and denied by the successor state government. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire was falling apart and the Turks enacted a planned series of vile and disgusting crimes against humanity against the Armenian minority. Taking the rule of thumb of ‘show don’t tell’ to heart, Akin shows us everything, again and again and on a couple of different continents. There is indiscriminate rape, throat slitting, dismembered bodies thrown down a well, and that is the first half hour.
The genocide features but The Cut is not a historical re-telling of the massacre from beginning to end. It is a backdrop, a catalyst for the rest of the story. It’s the Trojan War setting up Odysseus’s odyssey back home to Penelope. For The Cut begins as a nausea-inducing drama as the audience witnesses unspeakable acts, but the tale gradually morphs into an epic journey, even a western. Nazaret Manoogian (Tahar Rahim) works, runs, hides, and plods to hell and back to find the only faint lights left flickering in his soul. Nazaret is on a mission and even the gentleman his name alludes to is only one obstacle in a line of thousands to overcome.
The genocide features but The Cut is not a historical re-telling of the massacre from beginning to end. It is a backdrop, a catalyst for the rest of the story. It’s the Trojan War setting up Odysseus’s odyssey back home to Penelope. For The Cut begins as a nausea-inducing drama as the audience witnesses unspeakable acts, but the tale gradually morphs into an epic journey, even a western. Nazaret Manoogian (Tahar Rahim) works, runs, hides, and plods to hell and back to find the only faint lights left flickering in his soul. Nazaret is on a mission and even the gentleman his name alludes to is only one obstacle in a line of thousands to overcome.
Nazaret is a blacksmith in the town of Madrin in southeastern Anatolia, not too far from the Syrian border in today’s boundaries. Turkish gendarmes abruptly show up one night and throw all the village men on a chain gang of sorts building roads. Leaving his wife and twin daughters, Nazaret is an eyewitness as thousands of his fellow Armenians shuttle past on death marches toward their eventual demise in end of the world camps. When finally it is Nazaret’s turn to meet his maker, the Turk ordered to slit his throat only jabs him, slicing his voice box, but leaving him alive.
Nazaret loses his voice, perhaps a metaphor for an entire people unable to communicate the truth of what happened for almost a century. Nazaret’s journey includes stops in Ras al-Ayn and Aleppo, locales very much in the news today due to the Syrian civil war and ISIL. Akin’s dedication to historical accuracy is evident as we get to see how soap was made in the Middle East back then, the fact that many Armenian refuges escaped to Cuba and later on to the northern Midwest United States, and even the detailed Ottoman uniforms on the soldiers.
During one of the most intriguing scenes set after the war is over, a motion picture is shown in Nazaret’s refugee camp, a work of the devil many of the women say. The devil turns out to be Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid”, a story that makes Nazaret both laugh and weep reminding him of his girls. Learning from an old acquaintance the girls may still be alive kicks off the second half and the journey part of the story. Akin mentions John Ford’s The Searchers as an inspiration in dramatic composition and there are a few faint echoes of that film popping up as Nazaret scours half the globe for his daughters.
Filming in Jordan for the deserts and in Cuba, Canada, Malta, and Germany, Akin achieves global proportions for his epic. The Cut is the final installment in Akin’s Love, Death, and the Devil trilogy, preceded by 2004’s Head-On and 2007’s The Edge of Heaven. The Cut has nothing in common with these previous films detailing the Turkish experience in Germany, but they all share the same cinematographer, Rainer Kalusmann, who operates both in close-up and vast landscapes, in the searing Jordanian desert and the snows of Alberta.
Akin brought in Mardik Martin, who co-wrote Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Mean Streets, to re-write the script. Akin even collected Scorsese’s thoughts after an early screening. Allegedly, Scorsese said the material was too light, a constructive criticism Akin must have taken to heart considering how dark and heavy the finished product is. There is very little revenge in The Cut. After the Turks lose the war, there is a scene in Aleppo of the remaining Turks marching out of town eerily similar to the scene in Schindler’s List when the Jews are marching out and the little girl is yelling, “Goodbye Jews!” over and over again. A man picks up a rock and bloodies the temple of a little Turkish boy who certainly had nothing to do with the genocide. Perhaps Akin is saying there is no such thing as revenge for atrocities like that, just more suffering on all sides. Maybe only through accurate accounting and the frank discussion of the events will catharsis begin to show its face.
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