Le Voyage en Arménie (2006) - film review

When her father, Barsam, mysteriously disappears, Anna is deeply concerned.  A doctor, she has just diagnosed that he has a serious heart condition, and may die unless he is treated soon.  Picking up some clues that Barsam left behind, Anna flies off to Armenia, where her father was born.  There, whilst looking for her lost father, she collects a diverse entourage, including a chauffeur who cannot speak her language, a young French doctor, a former soldier and a young girl who is desperate to start a new life in France...

Robert Guédiguian takes a break from the sunny French port of Marseilles, the subject of most of his films to date, and heads East to the former Soviet state of Armenia.  There, joined by his stalwart associates Ariane Ascaride and Gérard Meylan, he embarks on a curious odyssey which is part road movie, part documentary-style portrait of life in a country making the painful transition from Communist control to Western-style liberalism.

Le Voyage en Arménie is an engaging film which is filled with the kind of bittersweet yet truthful slice-of-life vignettes which make Guédiguian’s cinema so appealing.  Anna’s reaction to what she encounters on her journey emphasises how little Westerners appreciate the daily ordeal endured by most ordinary people in the countries of the former Soviet Union.  As an intelligent woman, she should have anticipated that young girls are driven to prostitution to survive, that gangland criminality is rampant, and that the policing is pretty well non-existent.  It’s another world that Guédiguian shows us - brutal and unjust, and how ironic that he should also show us the alluring beauty of the country and its people.

As in some of his earlier films, Guédiguian manages to combine several genres, although less successfully than previously.  The thriller elements seem to have been shoehorned into the narrative and do undermine the film’s realism – surely it isn’t necessary for Anna to become personally involved with gangster activity for her to realise how dangerous Armenia can be?  This and other plot contrivances do weaken the film’s impact to some degree, but so potent and sincere is Guédiguian’s acute poetic sense that such blemishes are easily forgiven.   Le Voyage en Arménie extends not only our appreciation of his talent, but also our awareness of a troubled paradise on the edge of European civilisation.

© James Travers 2008

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