Human drama enriches story of Armenian genocide
Romance movies often use history as a mere backdrop, to provide exotic settings in which to place beautiful actors wearing elaborate period costumes acting out their emotionally gratifying stories. The public loves to see powerful emotions exhibited in attractive surroundings. Sadly, the actual history in these films is often given short shrift. Every once in a while, however, the filmmakers have a little more on their minds and use the romance as a conduit for telling a far more compelling and significant story. That, thankfully, is the case with The Promise.
Starring the very compelling trio of Oscar Isaac, Charlotte Le Bon and Christian Bale, The Promise is set during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire and the beginnings of World War I. The Turkish majority, allied with Germany, began a systemic cleansing of its Armenian population in what most historians now consider to be the first modern genocide. It is believed that 1.5 million Armenians were killed during and after the war, an assertion of fact that the modern Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge. The Armenian genocide is surprisingly little known today, though the parallels to more contemporary tragedies such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Syria make it horrifyingly relevant.
Writer-director Terry George (who dramatized another historical tragedy with his 2004 film Hotel Rwanda) has again in this circumstance used a personal story in the foreground to give emotional resonance and context to a historical event that can be difficult to truly grasp.
Isaac plays Mikael, a poor villager of Armenian heritage living in eastern Turkey (when it was the Ottoman Empire). With the dowry money provided by his betrothal, Mikael leaves home to study medicine in bustling modern Constantinople. There he encounters a world very different from his own: vibrant but also tottering on the edge of war. He meets Ana (Le Bon), an Armenian artist and her companion, Chris (Bale), an enterprising American reporter for the Associated Press. Complications, both personal and political, quickly develop.
But George never sacrifices the import of the larger societal tragedy in telling the stories of these people. In fact, they serve as a sympathetic lens through which we witness the horrifying plight of the Armenians, a plight that has painful echoes in today’s headlines. George deftly finds the narrative balance between the individuals at the heart of this story and the sweep of history in which they live.
Beyond the inherent power of the story, The Promise is a very well-made film, with effective photography—both beautiful and brutal—from Javier Aguirresarobe, and a resonant score from Gabriel Yared. The supporting cast, many of them actual Armenians, help create a world within the film that is at once familiar and quite new.
The Promise is not a film destined for box office records, and perhaps not even awards, but it is one of those rare films that deserved to be made, and now it deserves to be seen.
