Michael Goorjian’s Amerikatsi is a dramatic farce that explores two dark periods in Armenia’s history through the eyes of one man who manages to maintain a sense of hope even when his fellow man is cruel to him and fate is crueler. It’s a testament to our humanity and our ability to survive even in awful conditions, and an indictment of the systems and the people that make these conditions possible. It’s a beautiful, funny, heartfelt movie that deserves a much wider audience. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)
Charlie (played by Goorjian, who also wrote and directed the film) escapes the Armenian genocide of 1918 when his grandmother hides him in a cart, allowing him to escape execution at the hands of the Turks. Then just four years old, he ends up in the United States, but after World War II, when Josef Stalin called for Armenian expatriates to return home to held rebuild the country, Charlie does so, only to end up wrongly accused of being either an American spy or a capitalist pig or both, after which he’s sentenced to hard labor. From his cold prison cell, he can see into a nearby apartment, and he watches their lives as if it’s his daily soap opera, becoming invested in their relationship and in the man’s secret passion for art, leading Charlie to reach out and try to make a connection across an impossible boundary.
Much of what happens around Charlie is absurdist comedy, part Kafka, part Iannucci, and you have to just accept that he’s going to end up in prison despite the ridiculous circumstances that land him there. He barely speaks Armenian when he returns to the Caucasus and speaks no Russian, so any attempts to save himself after he’s arrested go nowhere, and he’s the butt of many jokes among the guards and even fellow prisoners, at least at first. He’s even thrown in the “icebox,” a storage room that’s especially cold in winter, yet over time he makes it his own space, at least, and jury-rigs contraptions like a clothesline or a way to sit at the high window and eat his meals while watching his neighbors, even writing down some of their customs like the order of the toasts after a big dinner. (Apparently, one of them is to Mount Ararat, a volcano in easternmost Turkey that is a symbol of Armenian culture and heritage.)
Charlie is an optimist, but not a fool, which is key to making this character work. He has hope, and it appears that nothing can truly extinguish it, but he isn’t blind to his situation; he hopes that there’s something better to come, not that someone will come save him from his current state. Goorjian plays him with such an earnestness that it’s easy to believe in the character, that Charlie could still find joy in small things, and that he’d take the risks he does take to get a message to his neighbor – who turns out to be a more important person than Charlie realizes – just to help another human. The guards call him “Charlie Chaplin,” an overt nod to the tramp-like qualities of the character, with Goorjian occasionally mimicking Chaplin’s walk in the film. The Tramp can be childlike and credulous, but his heart and his ingenuity win the day, which is a good summary of how this Charlie wins out in the end as well.
The score for Amerikatsi, by Armenian composer Andranik Berberyan,is exceptional, with folk music mixed with ambient music to provide some depth and color to what could otherwise have been very bland and grey scenes of Charlie in his prison. There’s also a familiar name in the credits, as the movie was executive produced by Serj Tankian of System of a Down, who also is listed under “additional music.”
Amerikatsi was Armenia’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and became the first Armenian film to make the shortlist, although it didn’t make the final cut of five nominees. I can’t say it deserved a nod, as I haven’t seen any of the five yet, but if they’re all better than this one, then 2023 might have been the best year in film history. Amerikatsi tells a simple if ridiculous story, and in so doing it gives us glimpses into Armenian history and epitomizes the strength of a people who’ve been victims of their neighboring aggressors for over a hundred years.