“Never lose your smile…Now fly away little stork. Carry us with you in your heart and one day you will return home.”
These are the words spoken in Michael A. Goorjian’s Amerikatsi by our young protagonist’s mother as she sneaks him into a box to smuggle out of the country. It’s 1915, and the Armenian Genocide, during which an estimated 800,000— one million Armenians were killed, has just begun. Ottoman Turks have arrived in town, but not before Charlie (Goorjian) and his family has managed to sneak him into a cargo container. These few short lines have sealed Charlie’s fate, forming his positive and hopeful attitude and setting him on his eventual path back home. After the passing of his wife more than 30 years later, Charlie fulfills his mother’s plea, returning to his homeland. It’s now 1948 and Armenia is under Soviet control. However, Stalin has promised restitutions and favorable conditions to Armenians scattered around the world if they return. Charlie, seeking to connect with his homeland to feel a renewed sense of belonging, returns with naively optimistic eyes.
Charlie arrives and soon becomes friends with Sona (Nelli Uvarova), the well-to-do wife of party-member Dmitry (Mikhail Trukhin). But in Soviet Armenia, getting too friendly with a party-member’s wife can have unexpected consequences. Through a series of fateful accidents and miscommunications, Charlie finds himself sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for crimes of cosmopolitanism and public displays of religious observance. But Charlie doesn’t dwell on his wrongful conviction and makes the best of his situation, developing a form of a friendship with prison guard and Sona’s brother in law, Tigran (Hovik Keuchkerian). It’s an odd relationship, if you can even call it that; Charlie can merely see into Tigran’s apartment from his prison cell, but it’s enough to bring Charlie joy and purpose. As Charlie immerses himself into Tigran’s life from afar, he finds meaning in this lowly form of human connection.
Amerikatsi enriches its historical plot with carefully placed symbolism and profound themes. Goorjian, who wrote, directed and starred, clearly cares deeply about the story. Goorjian is of Armenian heritage, and his grandfather was a survivor of the genocide. The elements of family and human connection are emphasized throughout and bring a tenderness into the script. But Goorjian personalizes the script in other ways as well, namely his experience on the set of the 1992 film, Chaplin.
Like some of Chaplin’s films that feature farcical comedy over a serious backdrop (The Great Dictator comes to mind), Amerikatsi doesn’t simply get bogged down in the brutality of Soviet-era Communism. Despite its R rating, the film rarely subjects us to harsh reality. We don’t witness the beatings that Charlie receives or the real brutality of prison life. In fact, in what could have been the film’s most brutal moment—derisive guards explain to Charlie that he has been sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in Siberia—the scene is immediately followed by a comical, Chaplinesque earthquake runaround. Goorjian doesn’t let the former emotional scene stay with us long. He brushes it off like Charlie, and even finds warmth and compassion following the earthquake when Charlie crosses his heart in concert with Tigran. This attitude of absurdism and lightheartedness in the face of serious events inspires the technical elements of the film as well. The cinematography feels snazzy and modern. There are high speed pans during action shots that have the style and energy of modern action movies. In short, Goorjian doesn’t let the story or the production be overwhelmed by its depressing setting.
Amerikatsi doesn’t just resemble Chaplin’s work in style; the film also weaves in allusions to silent films in its story (for one, Charlie is literally given the nickname “Charlie Chaplin”). For much of the second act, Charlie is both the audience of a silent movie and the actor of one as we watch him react from his cell to the scenes in Tigran’s apartment. He experiences joy dancing along to Tigran’s dinner party and betrayal when he realizes that his previously anonymous friend actually works for the party. Just as Charlie forgets his own struggles and lives vicariously through Tigran, we too forget about Charlie for the moment. The film shifts to the struggle of Tigran, the old drunk artist. We essentially watch a short silent film focused on Tigran in his daily home life, keeping busy painting or gambling with his neighbor, falling on and off the wagon, and trying to keep his marriage intact.
The motif of Chaplin-era silent films represents just one element of human relationships woven into the story. In the quote from the film’s opening scene, Charlie’s mother calls him a bird. And birds are featured throughout the movie, nesting above the loudspeakers in the prison yard. Sure he resides in the prison, but, like these birds, Charlie lives beyond the walls that confine him. In a similar vein, angels are another symbol used to depict both Charlie and Tigran. In the third act, Tigran is searching for his keys to his art cabinet and can’t see that they are in an angel-shaped vase. Charlie watches this in boiling frustration, eventually risking his life to send a signal to the Guard. In this way, Charlie acts as an angel himself, helping the guard out of a love that Tigran can’t fully comprehend, just like Charlie’s family saved him from the genocide by smuggling him out of the country. And Tigran, described by Charlie as the one “up in the air” helps him back by delivering him food and painting supplies. The point is hammered home in the final scene when Sona mentions the role of the Gorani birds, which literally fly and watch over us.
A highly personal project, Amerikatsi is about the importance of emotional connections and the lengths we go to achieve them. Charlie feels like he is missing a connection with the homeland he never knew and wants to reconnect with a family he lost. And he succeeds, even from a jail cell. Like the viewer in a silent film, Charlie is able to immerse himself into his constructed story of the guard’s life simply based on what he is able to see from his cell. He doesn’t need to be loved back. Simply by observing and imaginatively inserting himself into his environment, Charlie feels at home. His counterpart, Tigran, is also resigned to a prison of sorts, having used his connection to Sona to acquire a job as a prison guard. But he was once an artist, and his talent is now squandered. In Charlie’s imagined dinner scene with Tigran in the third act, he speaks of “all the Armenians around the world who can see past the walls that separate us…May we build upon our smiles instead of tears.” It’s a toast that summarizes the film’s main theme. Despite the boundaries that we face—exile, imprisonment or even a lack of freedom of expression—the human connection makes life worth living.
Photo courtesy of Variance Films
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