Fatih Akin's The Cut is an epic spanning the better part of a decade that is centered around the events of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, which saw mass killings and forced migration of the Armenian minority. The narrative is centered around Nazaret Manoogian, a blacksmith and family man, who is sent from his native village of Mardin to work as a forced laborer. Surviving the mass murder due to a great deal of luck, and an act of kindness, Nazaret sets out on a journey to find his family. Fatih Akin's The Cut is the filmmakers's least interesting film, a survival story of a man who ends up spanning the globe in search of his two twin daughters, whom he believes escaped the starvation and violence. There are moments of brilliance throughout The Cut but the film falls victim to an overly sentimental screenplay, feeling almost episodic in approach towards the back-half of the film. Don't get me wrong, The Cut is an important film that is deeply effective in stretches, capturing the monstrosities subject to the Armenian people. It can be a hard film to stomach at times, containing some deeply disturbing imagery, particularly in the first half of the film. In one of the more harrowing scenes, a mass killing, the captain tells his soldiers "Don't Waste Bullets", a casual reminder to the viewer that the Armenian people's lives were not even worth the price of the bullet it cost to kill them. Aforementioned, Akin's film does have some flashes of brilliance, like a post-genocide sequence that sees the Armenian people violently throwing rocks at the Turkish people leaving the area. While the showing the kid being struck with a rock feels a bit cheap, Akin uses this sequence to capture the violence that comes from anger, reminding the audience that violence begets more violence. While not exploring it enough for my liking, The Cut does provide glimpses of the fractured state of Nazaret's broken down psyche, with a few powerful sequences demonstrating how this is man haunted by the death of his wife and loss of his children. Akin's also raises interesting questions about faith and religion, questioning how anyone could have faith in their god after seeing such death and carnage all around them, but once again it is something that falls by the wayside to the plodding narrative. While Fatih Akin's The Cut feels by-and-large like a missed opportunity for such a talented filmmaker, this is a film that does a serviceable job at documenting the Armenian Genocide, being an ode to the Armenian immigrants who had to start all over again elsewhere.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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