The mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during and after the First World War is a curiously unexplored moment in our modern history, cinematically speaking. That fact alone makes director and co-writer Terry George’s The Promise intriguing enough.
But despite the best of intentions, the film fails to properly explain and contextualise both what led to that disgraceful episode, which Turkey to this day denies, and why it escalated as it did. Instead, The Promise chooses to focus in on an unsympathetic love triangle that manages to trivialise the film overall.
Thus we’re given the character Michael Boghosian (Oscar Isaac), an Armenian medical student from a small village in Southern Turkey who uses his fiancee’s dowry to study modern medicine in Constantinople. Michael isn’t in love with his fiancee (Angela Sarafyan). He kisses her goodbye and heads off to the big city.
He then essentially falls for the first woman he sees. The beguiling Ana (Charlotte Le Bon) is a cosmopolitan beauty and intellectual. Ana also happens to be in a relationship with Chris Myers (Christian Bale).
While Michael is enjoying the city life and lusting after Ana, though, things are devolving around him. It’s 1914 and vague signs of war are emerging. Things go on as normal for a little while — there are German soldiers at the parties now and battleships in the harbour and a heightened sense that some Turks are anti-Armenian. And then Constantinople’s Armenian intellectuals start getting arrested and taken away. To where is unclear. To fight? To prison camps? To be executed?
The intention, likely, is to put the viewer on the blurry ground level with Michael and Ana, who see their world turned upside down so suddenly that of course there would be confusion. Explanation and insight is hardly a priority when survival is the goal. But that’s where Bale’s Chris Myers should have been more useful.
To the film’s credit, he does take us early on to distant villages to witness townspeople being rounded up and walked through the desert. Women and children are executed without hesitation and, when Chris is spotted in the distance, soldiers take off after him. It’s clear they don’t want people seeing what they’re doing. He chimes in occasionally with helpful exposition as he’s dictating articles, and yet, it’s a wonder whether anyone who knows little about the events will actually be able to track what’s going on in a meaningful way.
The Promise is infinitely more interested in the triangle, dropping the three leads into convenient situations to heighten the will they/won’t they/can they/should they drama, which, frankly, becomes increasingly unsympathetic as the situation around them becomes more dire.
It’s unfair to critique such an utterly sincere film that does contain some riveting action and acting and even might inspire some to learn more about this moment in history, but unfortunately, the story just doesn’t live up to its grand ambitions.
Don’t miss it!
The Promise releases in the UAE on April 27.
