Many films about Jewish Genocide were made and most of them were acclaimed by spectators and critics. But movies about Armenian Genocide/Relocation/Meds Yeghern, whatever you call it, were very rare and none of them became successful. Award-winner filmmaker Fatih Akin's project had raised expectations for a good movie about 1915. And it wouldn't be one-sided: A Turkish director living in German and an Armenian writer from "diaspora" were together. As a Turkish-Armenian joint project, "The Cut" could have let 1915 really questioned by people, instead of insults from both sides.
Fatih Akin presents the main character as a person who cannot speak. The stab wound in the throat of blacksmith Nazaret Manukyan from Mardin, seems to symbolize the traumas inherited by today's Armenians. Nazaret can't speak, he can't explain clearly what happened to him. If you can't explain it properly, you can't talk about a genocide against your own people. After all, "There is no such thing as genocide", right? It seems like Fatih Akin is making a clever reference in this way?
Dedicating his film to Hrant Dink, a murdered Armenian writer, Fatih Akin makes Armenian characters speak English, not Armenian. In Elia Kazan's film "America America", which Fatih Akin sees as an inspiration, Greeks spoke English. In order to facilitate arousing international interest, Fatih Akin "saved" many people, especially the Americans, from the "trouble" of reading subtitles by making Armenians speak English. It would be better if realism was preserved. But luckily, Arabs speak Arabic, Turks speak Turkish, Cubans speak Spanish in the movie.
Fatih Akin has had a close relationship with Martin Scorsese in recent years. As they do film restorations together, they also exchange ideas about scripts. Mardik Martin, who is Fatih Akin's script partner here, had a hand in Scorsese films in the gangster-adventure genre. As a result, "The Cut" was born as an "adventure film" based on 1915. Fatih Akin describes his style as a "western".
Fatih Akin loves road stories. Here, we have much more longer roads than "Gegen die Wand" (2004) and "Auf der anderen Seite" (2007). He drags Nazaret Manukyan from Asia to the Caribbean and from there to America.
Why not a historical-drama movie with Armenian folk music, but an adventure with rock music? Why didn't this movie turn out to be a very good movie, even though it has a very good cinematography and an international cast?
I do not know from where Fatih Akin, who is said to have researched 1915 a lot, got his knowledge of Ottoman history. But there is no such thing like "Ottomans turned the minorities into enemies overnight after they desperately entered the war in 1914". The Armenian issue had been going on since the 1800s. Armenians, who were presented as minority, were not "minority" either. Populations of different ethnic groups were almost equally distributed in Anatolia at that time.
The movie portrays Ottoman soldiers as brutals: They don't do what is requested in return for a bribe, they just put the bribe in their pocket, their hands are always with whips, they like to "work" without wasting bullet, they always talk rude, they love to rape a woman, etc... It is said that "Life is shades of gray", but the Ottoman soldiers in the film are completely black - Purely evil. It is useless to claim that there was not a single conscientious character among those soldiers. It is too much to differentiate the concepts of good and bad, it is very cartoonish. Luckily, Nazaret Manukyan is not portrayed as "a white spoon out of milk", he is a jealous man.
Mehmet, the character played by Bartu Kucukcaglayan, is the most remarkable characterization of "The Cut" and Fatih Akin's second success after the main character who cannot speak. He is released from a prison because they want him to kill some "Armenian traitors". Mehmet is poor, a miserable. He is considered to be ready to kill people for some money. Mehmet is not a "sinless white" or a "brutal black", he is one of "the shades of gray", he has made many mistakes in this life and his heart, his conscience hurts and he saves Nazaret. If you ask "Are there no good Turks in the movie?", the answer is Mehmet at first.
Mehmet begs for forgiveness by giving his boots to Nazaret, who will embark on a long journey. That scene is very important, the "political smell" of the movie is felt here. While shooting "The Cut", Fatih Akin aimed to make a film with style, "a 1915-western", he also adopted a conciliatory political stance. According to Fatih Akin; to make 1915 be talked in society, we need to feel sorry for this Armenian character, Nazaret, by looking at the difficulties he suffered during his long journey. After all, we have to feel sorry for 1915 as well, and apologize for it - Like everything will be alright if you apologize. However, there are more important things than our personal mercies. It is necessary to look at the subject scientifically, not from the sense of mercy of ordinary individual people. What was aimed and achieved with the 1915 events? That's a question which must be answered in a movie about 1915.
Nazaret goes to Aleppo in search of his twin daughters. While he is in Aleppo, World War comes to an end. In the scene of Turks leaving Aleppo, the Armenians are so enraged that they even throw stones to immigrant civilians. Nazaret, on the other hand, refuses - Just because there are children in the crowd - As if he were the only person who lost his own children, the only person sensitive to children. Everyone else is a huge fan of stone-throwing, regardless of whether they're women or children. We can't get anywhere with such expressions, one character should not be reflected as "pure goodness" and the others as "pure evil".
The third plus of the movie: A moment of silence for Charlie Chaplin... Every single person watching Chaplin's silent film laughs and forgets their pains for a moment. We see what a great artist Chaplin is, that he gives hope to people, and that the father-child relationship in the movie resembles Nazaret's one.
Nazaret deepens his search. He tracks down his daughters in an orphanage in Lebanon, but when he learns that one of his daughters has been married to a Cuban, he must go to Cuba. Fatih Akin makes Cuba of 1922 seem like a place where everyone dresses like rich Americans, lives very comfortably. Cuba had been a colony since the early 1900s and was a very poor country. People were starving and miserable. The movie claims that in Cuba, everyone was happy with their life for some reason.
Fatih Akin likes to make the road longer and longer, he loves to show the audience quite a lot of venues. We learn that the girls have already traveled from Cuba to the USA.
The US part looks a bit silly. An American gives directions to Nazaret in English language, and he, an Armenian who does not know English, understands this perfectly clear. Some viewers may think that both characters speak the same language and may not see anything absurd in this scene, but it is actually absurd. Anyway, throughout the movie, there is no logical explanation for Nazaret Manukyan's ability to understand what people (other than Armenians and Turks) are saying. How does he understand the Arabic of the Arab soap makers, the English of the orphanage headmistress, who is obviously a European, and the Spanish of the Cubans? How does a blacksmith from Mardin know so much foreign language? No answer. He may have heard of country capitals, but where did he learn their language? Foreign language knowledge of a wealthy, traveller merchant is reasonable, but not of a poor blacksmith.
The "western adventure" that Fatih Akin has aimed for, is in the USA scenes. But it is so childish to neutralize an armed man with a tiny piece of wood. I guess Clint Eastwood would have laughed if he saw this.
The story that started with ironwork in Mardin in 1915, extends to railroad work in North Dakota in 1923. For some reason, a stunned Nazaret does not freeze to death in that cold snow. He gets up under the influence of those "hallucinations", which are very, very cliché. As if the revelation has come, he goes into the dark and finds the Armenian workers directly, and they tell him directly where his daughter is. He goes there and the only person he sees in town is his daughter. So cliche and simple... With an unnecessary quote like "You found me dad", as if the audience and the two characters did not know or see this meeting, we get an extremely flat finale. Take a look at the scene in the movie "Room" (2015) where the little boy reunites with his mother. Compare it with the father-daughter reunion here. The Cut's reunion is not touching at all.
Fatih Akin made a very bad choice about the female lead. He chose a mature-looking woman to play an 18-year-old girl. And he didn't make Nazaret look older with some make-up, so they look like brother&sister, not father&daughter. In a scene that already contains bad dialogues, no emotion can pass to the audience from such a mismatched duo.
Fatih Akin always relies on the images, but this is a movie. It's not landscape paintings, it's not a photo album. Unfortunately, you can't get anywhere with just cinematography.
"The Cut" is a movie that tries to make every side, Armenians, Turks and Europeans, satisfied:
1- The movie claims that Armenians suffered at the scale of genocide and the film's purpose is to make their voices be heard from everywhere.
2- The movie claims that all problems can simply be solved with an apologize from the Turks.
3- The movie claims that Europeans always protect the aggrieved ones like Armenians.
While most of the Western Armenian girls were either sold and turned into slaves or adopted by Turkish or Kurdish muslim families, Fatih Akin drags his main character from place to place, to create his own "western adventure", exploiting the scenes he shot from 3 continents and exploiting the tragedy of 1915.
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