Cecil says: Another film set in one of the world wars, but for once this one tells the story from an angle we do not often hear about in the west: this was all to do with the massacre of Armenians in Turkey in WW1 (and I enjoyed it almost as much as I'd enjoyed Flamme & Citron which looked at WW2 from the perspective of Denmark).
This film had so many aspects worth talking about that it took us virtually our whole half hour drive home to talk through our impressions.
So the plot basically revolves around an Armenian man living in a Turkish village who wants to become a doctor. To raise the money for medical school in Constantinople, he gets betrothed to a young lass in his village and then goes off for two years study with the dowry.
In the meantime, war breaks out, he falls in love with another woman in Constantinople and life changes completely. I'll say no more so as not to spoil for those who haven't seen the film yet, but there are many twists and turns in this epic film that lasts more than two hours and ends in modern-day America with some of the survivors reflecting back on those earlier times.
It was fabulous for us to trigger memories of places visited on our long overland journey from Yorkshire to Australia: there was Istanbul, of course, with its markets and tea rooms, its bustle and beauty, but also its reminder of just how close to the surface oppression is in that city (the prison guards reminded me of those in American Express, and who's to say they aren't still the same today as Pride marchers were arrested on the streets of Istanbul on the same day as when we saw the film in the safety of Nowra); there were memories of Baku and its dimly-lit tea houses and narrow lanes.
And it reminded us of how the people we met in Azerbaijan - in a town close to the Iranian border - had not been keen for us to visit the local memorial for the Armenian genocide.
What was interesting was to learn that the massacres of Armenians began already in 1915 (the few of us who did know about the genocide, think of it as being 1918). It was also moving to see the forced labour made to build a railway in Turkey - Hollywood has made everyone in the English-speaking world aware of the Bridge over the River Kwai in Thailand, but how many more such projects were forced on POWs in other parts of the world? Probably a lot more than we realise.
Having just seen Their Finest, where propaganda film-makers in WW2 are forced to find a role for an American to broaden the film's appeal, we couldn't help wondering if this was a real life version of the same...
I was tempted to whisper to Bea half way through this film to ask: What was the name of the film? I had genuinely forgotten. But The Promise (presumably by budding doctor to young village girl) began to feel like such a small part of the plot as the film developed. Was there an original version of this screenplay without the love triangle involving the American journalist? He plays a more and more important role as the story progresses and he becomes more and more a hero (very like the American they invent in Their Finest). And the scene where the US Ambassador stands up to the Turkish Interior Ministry felt almost Trumpian in its 'America First' way.
Some of the casting was slightly odd, too. Charlotte Le Bon is good as the new love interest, but she hardly looks like a village Armenian, and we both thought when she first appeared that she was some sort of American governess to the rich man's kids.
Then there's the daughter of same rich man who is delightful but looks so mixed race that when she first appeared, I assumed the rich Armenian had married a black woman, and that confused me for a while as no black woman ever appeared through the film.
For all that, The Promise is a fabulous film and I'm so glad we chose it over the other option for early Sunday morning, which would have been Churchill.
****
Bea says: This is a film in the style of the great epics; it put me in mind of Dr Zhivago – the backdrop of war changing the lives of the young people forever; a complicated love triangle; and some lovely shots of the landscape. Whether it actually quite makes epic status itself is a questionable; it certainly tries but perhaps just falls a little short.
Cecil has summarised the story above, and
like him I certainly enjoyed seeing the locations and landscapes that we
personally had travelled through and learning about a historical incident I
knew little about; as opposed to the more often told stories of the Great War
(the trenches, Gallipoli, etc.).
Its
“epicness” worked in that it totally transported me to the place and era, and I
was completely caught up in the story, action and characters – a thoroughly
enjoyable experience for a Sunday morning matinee. I really cared about what happened, and the
characters developed over time.
What didn’t
work was (and I echo Cecil here) some of the casting (Charlotte Le Bon just
doesn’t look like she came from an Armenian village…) and the title didn’t feel
at all like the focus of the film.
Chatting to Cecil on the way home we thought if anything it was more
about standing by one’s convictions rather than keeping to a promise; either
the plot developed as the film was made, or it was a translation from Armenian
that didn’t quite work, or it was two film stories that were merged, which it
occasionally felt like to me. I also
wondered if they had tried out a couple of endings, as (spoiler alert) the
death of Charlotte Le Bon’s character Anna felt rather….convenient, if
sad. That scene was also a bit
derivative – Titanic, The Piano, and
it broke my involvement in the story as I thought how similar the scene was to
those films’ scenes.
On another note, it was interesting to hear
Chris Cornell’s song of the same name while the credits rolled, and Christian
Bale was excellent thoughout this film and the standout actor for me.
Definitely worth a watch, a particularly
good Sunday film if you want to escape for a while.
***1/2
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