'ARARAT' TELLS IMPORTANT TALE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

WITH TITLES such as ``Next of Kin,'' ``Family Viewing,'' ``The Adjuster'' and ``The Sweet Hereafter'' on his resume, the distinctive Canadian director Atom Egoyan is clearly concerned with stories about the ways families cope with the many disruptions of modern life. Often he filters their traumas through the kaleidoscopic devices of 20th-century media, always seeking out a way that they can live to tell the story of their trials.

With the astonishingly ambitious ``Ararat,'' Egoyan takes these themes to extremes so complex and inspired that only the most important of subjects can really justify the effort. The film does not fall short in that department: It's built around (although it is not exclusively about), the Ottoman Empire's World War I genocide of a million Armenians, Egoyan's ethnic forebears.

The Empire's nation-state descendant, Turkey, still officially denies the massacre occurred. Some other countries have yet to recognize it, as well. The movie even notes that Hitler told his generals not to worry about the Holocaust they went on to perpetrate; after all, nobody remembered the Armenian extermination, he reasoned.

In his typically elliptical manner, Egoyan eases us into the history by first enwrapping us in mesmerizing, strange, contemporary relationships. Raffi (talented newcomer David Alpay) is a young Torontan whose greatest knowledge of his people's past is tied to his father's death trying to assassinate a Turkish diplomat. His academic mom, Ani (Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan's wife and frequent collaborator), has built an image of her first husband as a hero, even though her second, French-Canadian spouse also died under, shall we say, romantic circumstances.

Number Two's daughter from a previous marriage, Celia (Marie Josee Croze), has convinced herself that Ani made her dad jump or, worse, pushed him; she's having an affair with stepbrother Raffi, perhaps out of passion, maybe as a way to turn him against his mother, probably some of both.

Edward Saroyan, a once-great French-Armenian filmmaker played by French-Armenian singer/actor Charles Aznavour, comes to Toronto to shoot a movie based on his mother's experience and the real-life memoir of Clarence Ussher, an American missionary who witnessed the systematic destruction of the Armenian town of Van in 1915 (another Egoyan regular, Bruce Greenwood, plays the actor playing Ussher). The movie within the film, though inevitably appalling and heartbreaking, is kind of cheesy, too. It's a way for Egoyan to make a trademark statement about the impossibility of movies, or any media creation, to accurately convey even the most black-and-white aspects of troubling reality.

Both Ani and Raffi become involved with the film. She, an expert on the exile painter Arshile Gorky (who escaped Van), constantly questions the truth of the piece. But Raffi is even more deeply affected. A year later, he goes to Turkey to surreptitiously film around that title mountain from which we all are said to have came forth, the related children of Noah. Returning through the Toronto airport, he's stopped by a customs officer, David (Christopher Plummer), who doesn't even know that his own family crisis connects him to Saroyan's film. Suspecting that Raffi is smuggling drugs, David interrogates him about the contents of the film cans that the young man refuses to open to exposing light. David hears a much more intriguing, and moving, story than he ever expected.

As Egoyan interweaves these and several other plot strands through a complicated skein of seeing and telling, the connections sometimes blur a bit, and occasionally fray into obscurity or preciousness. But overall, he accessibly builds his daunting, difficult, multilayered structure into a towering meditation on oppression, cruelly selective amnesia and loss.

But sad as it is, ``Ararat'' is far from a downer, as Egoyan also explores the real possibilities of how those awful things can be counterbalanced, albeit generations and continents away, by the members of an integrated society's shared commitment to understanding, freedom and forgiveness.

That, and the sheer exhilaration of a great film artist operating at the peak of his formal and intellectual powers, make ``Ararat'' a beautiful and essential experience. Regardless of how much it makes you weep.

ARARAT - Three and one half stars

(R: violence, sex, nudity, racism, children in jeopardy, drugs, language)

Starring: David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Marie-Josee Croze, Bruce Greenwood, Arsinee Khanjian, Elias Koteas, Christopher Plummer, Simon Abkarian.

Director: Atom Egoyan.

Running time: 2 hr. 6 min.

Playing: The Exchange, Glendale; ArcLight, Hollywood; Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

In a nutshell: Complex, devastating examination of the Ottoman Empire's World War I genocide of Armenians.

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Photo:

Christopher Plummer, left, and David Alpay star in the complex and ambitious ``Ararat.''