BEFORE: Christian Bale carries over from "Amsterdam" and look, Oscar Isaac's back! At least one of these actors will make the year-end countdown for sure. But there are just four films until Easter and an appropriate movie for the holiday, and then I'm going to switch over to documentaries for the rest of the month. I usually call it the "Summer Rock & Doc Block", but I may have to find a new name for it, because there's just not much rock and roll this time around, I already watched all of those films. Buddy Guy, Dionne Warwick, Miles Davis, maybe Louis Armstrong - those people are NOT rockers. OK, Sheryl Crow, maybe, but then again, I'm not so sure - and Sinead O'Connor definitely wasn't a rocker, either. I don't think so. I've got some films about sports stars ("Jock Doc Block"?), actors and then there's D.B. Cooper, Roy Cohn and Kurt Vonnegut. OK, so I guess it's just a "Doc Block", how boring is that?
And in the latest episode of "The Masked Singer", Season 9, The Doll was unmasked tonight. I won't say who it was, but my wife guessed this one on the freakin' nose, based on the singer's accent in his speaking voice. Right now, she and I are dead even for our guesses for the season, she correctly predicted the Doll, the Night Owl and the Polar Bear, while I correctly guessed the identities of the Rock Lobster, the Wolf and (most likely) the California Roll, only that last one hasn't been unmasked yet, but COME ON, we all know who that is! We could just team up and figure them all out - but we're too competitive. I'm even more competitive than she is, though she'd probably disagree...
THE PLOT: Set during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, a love triangle forms between Michael, a brilliant medical student, the beautiful and sophisticated Ana, and Chris - a renowned American journalist based in Paris.
AFTER: This week has turned out to be more historical than I intended perhaps, but that's OK, it's all about learning stuff sometimes, whether that's the life of Marie Curie or the Business Plot of 1933. Tonight the Armenian genocide is the backdrop for the story - and this makes THREE films in a row set fully or partially during World War I. We saw Marie Curie and her daughter treating wounded Allied soliders, same for Margot Robbie's character in "Amsterdam", and today's film is set during the same time-frame. This was accidental, not intentional, but it just kind of shakes down this way sometimes. (Tomorrow's film is set in the future, but after that, back to World War II...)
The causes of the Armenian genocide seem very complex, I'm not going to understand it all just by reading one Wikipedia article, but it's obviously ethnically-based, and had something to do with the Ottoman Empire losing territory in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. So there were fears among the Ottoman leaders that the Armenians in the eastern provinces (of what is now Turkey) would seek independence, so the Ottomans called a few pockets of resistance a "rebellion", and set out to arrest and deport hundreds of Armenian leaders from Constantinople. Something along the lines of "if they won't join you, get rid of them". The deportations started in April (of course) of 1915.
Then up to 1.2 million of the remaining Armenians were sent on death marches into the Syrian Desert, and those that didn't die from violent treatment, or lack of food and water, were kept in concentration camps. (This seems like it got repeated in World War II, just with different players - as we learned last night, history repeats itself because history forgets itself...). Some Armenian women and children were converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households, but most never made it that far, and were killed in massacres, but to the current day, the Turkish government maintains that there was no genocide, just massive deportations. Right. Even if you call it "ethnic cleansing", which I guess is designed to somehow SOUND better, it's still the same abhorrent practice.
It doesn't even make any sense, at a time when the Ottoman empire was at war with Russia, they blamed their losses on the Armenians in their own territory. After losing more than 60,000 soldiers to harsh winter conditions in December of 1914, the remaining armies marched back and destroyed Armenian villages in their own territory, massacring their own people. They claimed that there was an Armenian conspiracy going on, plotting against the Empire, but the Armenians just considered themselves subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and ended up paying with their lives for losses in battle that they had NOTHING to do with. Why kill your own people at a time when you could use their help against the Russians?
Anyway, this is the backdrop for tonight's complicate love triangle, or quadrilateral I guess. Mikael Boghosian gets married in the Armenian village of Siroun, and uses his wife's dowry to pay for medical school in Constantinople. He plans to complete the three-year program in just two years so he can back to his village and find a way to love his wife. Which is a great plan, unless some kind of war breaks out. Mikael meets an Armenian woman from Paris, who's involved with an American reporter who keeps trying to get the word out about the trouble brewing in the country. (This could come up again later...)
MIkael falls in love with Ana, even though he's engaged, and Ana falls in love with Mikael, because her American reporter boyfriend drinks too much and is emotionally unavailable. (What did she expect? He's American...). But then the war breaks out, and the Ottomans try to draft Mikael, even though he's a medical student. His well-connected friend, fellow medical student Emre, bribes the soldiers and gets the "medical student exemption" for Mikael and himself. Technically this exemption didn't exist, but that's what a bribe will get you.
But then when Mikael's wealthy uncle gets rounded up for deportation, they try to pull the bribery stunt again, and Emre's powerful father gets his son drafted and has Mikael sent to a labor camp. Which is a terrible place to be, building the railroads is such hard work that some of the men invent the self-explosive vest just to break up the routine a little bit.
Mikael manages to escape from the labor camp (What's weird here is that before watching "The Promise", I watched Episode 10 of "Andor" which had almost the exact same plotline, with prisoners building weapons for the Empire in a factory, and Andor masterminding an escape) but it's a long way back to Constantinople, so he jumps aboard a passing train, which turns out to be full of Armenians headed to a concentration camp. OK, new plan, he heads back to his village and finds his parents, who are so happy to see he's alive, they immediately plan his wedding to that local girl whose dowry paid for his medical school. Oh, yeah, almost forgot about her. They get married and hide up in a mountain cabin, but a difficult pregnancy brings them back to the village. The plan to grow to love this woman seems to be working, only then Mikael learns that Ana and Chris came looking for him, and he tracks them down at the local Red Cross.
Mikael plans to head back to his village with Ana and Chris and a group of orphans, only halfway there they pass the soldiers who have massacred the entire village, including all of Mikael's family, his wife and parents, while he was gone. And their bodies were all just dumped by the side of the road, which seems to have been the practice during the genocide - so many people killed they didn't have time to bury them all. Chris, the reporter, is captured and charged with being a spy because of all the news articles he'd sent back to America about the killing of Armenians. It's Emre to the rescue again, Emre alerts the American ambassador, who demands the release of the American reporter, but it's Emre who pays the price, once again.
Meanwhile Mikael and Ana and have reconnected and are still in charge of a band of orphans, they join a large group of refugees who make their stand on Mount Musa Dagh. Chris gets on board a French ship that's coming to rescue those same refugees, who escape from the mountain while under constant bombardment from the Turks. The whole gang boards lifeboats to get to the cruiser, but getting shelled by mortars the whole time. Well, let's just say the odds catch up with some of them, and maybe not everyone makes it out.
Sure, it's a bummer of a storyline, but that's the whole point. You can't have a story about genocide or ethnic cleansing and expect everything to work out, know what I mean? The horrors of the war on Armenians have to manifest themselves somehow, and so there has to be a body count. If anything, this came along at a time when I maybe needed to be reminded that my life has been pretty war-free up to this point, I've been very lucky compared to some others throughout history. When my job is getting me down and my boss is a pain in the ass, I suppose there's always that, that I've never served in a war or been on the receiving end of a genocide. It's not much to take comfort in, but I guess I'll still take it. I'm also glad that I didn't put this film in the "romance" chain, sure there's a romance but the war story kind of takes precedence.
Also starring Oscar Isaac (last seen in "The Card Counter"), Charlotte Le Bon (last seen in "The Hundred-Foot Journey"), Marwan Kenzari (last seen in "The Old Guard"), Shohreh Aghdashloo (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Angela Sarafyan (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Daniel Giménez Cacho, Tom Hollander (last seen in "The King's Man"), Numan Acar (last seen in "Aladdin" (2019)), Igal Naor (last heard in "Wendell & Wild"), Milene Mayer, Sofia Black-D'Elia (last seen in "Ben-Hur" (2016)), Tamer Hassan (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Rade Serbedzija (last seen in "Middle Men"), Alicia Borrachero (last seen in "Terminator: Dark Fate"), Abel Folk (last seen in "Vicky Christina Barcelona"), Jean Reno (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods"), James Cromwell (last seen in "Eraser"), Kevork Malikyan (last seen in "Flight of the Phoenix" (2004)), Stewart Scudamore (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Andrew Tarbet (last seen in "Walking Tall" (2004)), Aaron Neil (last seen in "The Hustle"), Ozman Sirgood (last seen in "Art School Confidential"), Aharon Ipalé (last seen in "Ishtar"), Lucia Zorrilla, Roman Mitichyan (last seen in "Message from the King"), Armin Amiri (last seen in "Reservation Road"), Shnorhk Sargsyan, Anthony Rotsa, Michael Stahl-David (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Marco Khan, Simon Andreu (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Vic Tablian, James Chanos (last seen in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), André Marques
RATING: 5 out of 10 swaying lifeboats
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