The Cut

"Nararet" (Tahar Rahim) lives with his two daughters in what is a rapidly declining Ottoman Empire as the Great War rages around them. The authorities decide that all their Armenian peoples are too be moved out and he becomes separated from his young girls. Looking for them isn't going to be easy as the ensuing power vacuum is seeing both the Turkish army and some marauding opportunists vie for control of the territory and it's resources - and those also include people, too. Lucky to escape with his life - though not his voice - his travels now take him on a journey that is frought with danger, peppered with a little kindness, and destined to take him half way across the globe. Will he find his daughters - by now grown up? I like Rahim and am always impressed that his skills as a polyglot can imbue his character with an extra dimension of richness. "Nazaret" has unwillingly sacrificed his voice and gained a visceral purpose, and I thought Rahim delivered an engagingly aloof, almost automated, performance effectively as his trek lurches from frying pan to fire on more than one occasion but never deters him from finding his girls. Honestly, some of the story development might seem a little serendipitous, but then I wondered if "Nazaret" was really in that much of a minority as he traverses ancient Biblical lands and discovers that there are kindly people willing to help him out - many of whom have been dispossessed themselves, or have lost loved ones and who are keen to assist when they, too, have nothing. It is a slow burn, but I felt it benefitted from taking it's time to showcase just how ghastly the effects of ethnic cleansing are and the paucity of dialogue added an additional degree of vulnerability to a character that ages well beyond his years throughout. In some ways it reminded me a little of the second part of David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) as it illustrated the brutally of this failing regime and as a characterful study of a man on a mission, I felt it delivered well.