A metaphysical road movie about life, death and the limits of knowledge, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” has arrived just in time to cure the adult filmgoer blues. It was directed by the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose earlier movies include “Distant”and “Three Monkeys” and who in recent years has emerged as one of the consistently most exciting directors on the international scene. His latest, which shared the grand prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, takes the unassuming form of a police investigation that, as miles and words mount, evolves into a plangent, visually stunning meditation on what it is to be human.
Archive for the ‘Review’ tag
Review | Turkish history without subtlety no comments
Posted at 10:51 am in Turkish Cinema
Turkish history without subtlety
By Mark Jenkins
Friday, Apr. 27, 2012
“Making history is no job for cowards,” announces the hero of “Fetih 1453,” a Turkish war epic that’s awash in virility. Even the movie’s principal female character, who poses as a guy to help her adoptive father build state-of-the-art cannons, exemplifies manly virtue.
Battle flicks are big on bravery, of course, and this account of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople doesn’t stint on courageous self-sacrifice. For every soul-stirring clash, however, there’s at least one laugh-out-loud moment. Making history may require only bravado, but making historical movies demands subtlety as well.
The 1453 fall of Constantinople, legend has it, was foretold by Muhammad. So the movie begins with the announcement of Islam’s prophet – not actually shown, since that would be blasphemous – that the Orthodox Christian city will fall. It’s left to young Sultan Mehmet II (Devrim Evin), a classic overachiever, to fulfill the prediction some 800 years later.
“Fetih 1453″ was cut by 25 minutes for American release, but there are still plenty of preliminaries. Relying heavily on CGI, director Faruk Aksoy swoops from Mehmet’s court to Constantinople, Genoa, the Vatican and other grand places, introducing the political powers that support or,, more likely, oppose the sultan’s ambitions. When the locale is Christian, the filmmakers helpfully emblazon just about every piece of clothing and furniture with a cross.
The combat scenes that rouse the last third of the movie employ thousands of people (or their digital avatars). But, like most such epics, “Fetih 1453″ focuses on just a few players. In addition to Mehmet, there’s his friend and sword-fighting coach Hasan (Ibrahim Celikkol), an exemplary warrior who’s guaranteed the spotlight during the final battle.
Hasan loves Era (Dilek Serbest), who was sold into slavery but freed by weapon-maker Urban (Erdogan Aydemir). Era keeps spurning Hasan’s proposals, but once they become comrades in arms, her attraction to him grows. There’s even a kiss, although the movie is careful about such things. Scantily clad dancing girls are kept on the Christian side of the beaded curtain, and Mehmet is reduced to a single wife. (The historical sultan had a few more.)
The movie’s English subtitles sometimes fail it, and perhaps some wit was lost in translation. Given the stilted acting, though, it seems likely that the dialogue is just as clunky in the original. Even Turkish audiences probably giggle when Mehmet solemnly instructs troops headed to a brutal war to “have a safe trip.”
Contains bloody violence. In Turkish with English subtitles.
Review | Night Of Silence no comments
Posted at 2:28 pm in Turkish Cinema
Mavi Boncuk |
Night Of Silence
12 February, 2012 | By Dan Fainaru
Dir/scr: Reis Celik. Turkey. 2012. 90mins
The minimalist spirit of Nuri Bilge Ceylan is hovering over the proceedings in Night Of Silence (Lal Gece) and indeed, he gets an appropriate mention in the final credits. With the exception of a 15 minutes introduction, the entire picture takes place in one single room and relies on two remarkably subtle and understated performances by a man in his sixties and a young girl who couldn’t be more than 14.
Celik’s direction pinpoints a way of life and a certain type of ceremonies that add their own dimension to the metaphor.
Deliberately very slow, often poetical but certainly nothing like any wedding night movie one would imagine, it’s inclusion in Berlinale’s Generation section might be misleading, for Reis Celik, better known as a documentary filmmaker, offers the kind of fiction to be savoured only by patiently mature art house audiences.
Having spent most of his life behind bars for killing, first his mother and then another man, to safeguard the honour of the family, Damat/Groom (Ilyas Salman) is finally back in his mountain village and the family has arranged for him to marry a girl he has never seen, Gelin/Bride (Dilan Aksut).
The marriage isn’t just the prize he gets for respecting tradition at a high cost, but also the final act that will put an end to an ancient blood feud between two families. Though it opens with the customary colourful local scenes of a traditional Turkish country wedding, the mood changes once Celik leads his two main protagonists into the bridal room, where the act of marriage is to be consumed and proof of the husband’s virility – as well as of his wife’s virginity – is to be produced when the sun comes up.
From this point on the film unfolds in an unexpected direction. For the two persons left alone in this room are both terrified, each in his own way and both for their own very good reasons. They both realize they have to play their parts as husband and wife just as conventions expect them, but neither one nor the other knows exactly how to do it.
The girl, a pretty image of early adolescence, is fearful and surly, hesitating and trying any subterfuge she can think of to delay the critical moment. The man, squat, stocky, with a weather-beaten face and an awe-inspiring moustache, is surprisingly gentle and understanding in his own gruff way, attempts to melt down her resistance and refrains from ever using his authority or force, to get his way. As the sparing match between the two of them reaches its final stages, the girl seems to cope with her anguish better than the man, whose past keeps creeping up to the surface to crush him down.
With its opening sequence taking place in a cemetery and the final one overlooking the spectacular snow-covered landscape of a silent village, the morning after, this isn’t a very happy picture. Its intimate, sensitive and well-shot portrait of a tragic situation foretold, could be easily construed as a veiled allegory of a society keeling under the weight of patriarchal customs and never daring to say a word against it.
Unobtrusively, Celik’s direction pinpoints a way of life and a certain type of ceremonies that add their own dimension to the metaphor. The restraint of both Ilyas Salman and Dilan Aksut plays in their favour, both of them simple, humane and touching characters, their reactions to each other natural and devoid of all mannerisms. There is no musical score to underline the plot, the spare nature of the entire project is eloquent enough on its own terms.
Production companies: Kaz Film, Istanbul
Executive Producers: Israfil Parlak, Ekrem Celik
Cinematography: Gurhan Tiryaki
Editor: Reis Celik
Production design: Burcu Karakas
Main cast: Ilya Salman, Dilan Aksut
Review | Beyond the Hill no comments
Posted at 11:48 am in Turkish Cinema
Mavi Boncuk |BERLIN 2012 REVIEW: BEYOND THE HILL (TEPENIN ARDI)
by Brian Clark, February 12, 2012 1:32 AM
BERLIN / EFM 2012, CONTINENTAL EUROPE & RUSSIA, THRILLER
On the surface, Beyond the Hill is a fairly straight-forward slow-burn psychological thriller about an unseen enemy. However, within this structure, Director Emin Alper weaves in pointed political and cultural allegory along with elements of (deep breath…) dark comedy, revisionist-westerns, family-dramas, mysteries and horror films. That he’s able to deftly balance all of these aspects without losing the audience or sacrificing the film’s suspense is all the more impressive.
The film takes place in a rural valley in Turkey underneath rocky hills. Here, an old man named Faik spends his retirement tending land in his hometown with the help of a sharecropper family. As the movie begins, an ongoing conflict between Faik and the nomads over the hell is apparently reaching a boiling point, and the old man is already fraught with anger and paranoia. After his son and grandsons arrive to visit, everything goes off the deep end.
The less said about how the plot develops, the better, which is a relief since the complicated character dynamics which fuel the film’s momentum would take at least another five hundred words to describe. Not to worry though, thanks to a meticulous script and excellent acting across the board, everything is communicated smoothly and without fuss.
As the various alliances, suspicions and checkered histories escalate so does Faik’s obsessive paranoia about the nomads. If Faik seems to be blowing the rivalry out of proportion, well, that seems to be the norm with this family. In fact, one slightly problematic aspect of the film is the fact that almost every character is either completely misguided, self-absorbed or in many cases, both. The notable exception is Meryem, the only adult female. But, though she’s clearly more level-headed then all of the men combined, no one really listens to her. Probably not the first woman this has ever happened to.
Still, the acting is superb, and the flaws actually create the ticking-time-bomb anticipation about each character, which proves crucial to the film’s suspense. And, as an interesting side note, Alper maintains in the press notes that Faik’s irrational fear of the other is the norm for Turkey, and points to the Kurdish conflict along with other historical examples to back this assertion up.
In any case, we suspect from the beginning that the nomads aren’t really the biggest threat here. But the way Alper toys with genre conventions and expectations to maintain a sense of mystery, and more importantly, dread, makes this point almost moot.
For example, we know that that the youngest boy’s fascination with his grandfather’s rifle will probably end badly. However, Alper never pays off this plot point the way we expect, and by the time he does, the tension created by other subplots is so thick, that the boy’s action seems like an afterthought. By two-thirds into the movie, every gunshot that echoes off the hill is a cause for alarm, even if we’re not sure who is responsible for it or what the exact circumstances are. When everything finally converges, we are not left with the ending we expect, but rather something much more inspired, darkly-hilarious and in its way, perfectly fitting.
The sprawling rural landscape is also integrated seamlessly into the film, with cinematography that refuses to merely capture the sense of space, but to actively engage it in the story. Alper’s direction is also masterful, and nearly every shot in the film is infused with some sense of wonder, dread or both. Several well-timed camera movements aid film’s tension so well that they’d make Brian De Palma blush.
I did describe the movie as a “slow-burn” thriller, and it’s worth noting that the story takes a bit of time to pick up momentum. Personally, I didn’t have a problem with this strategy, and for the most part, the film works much better this way. However, while Alper indeed carries the multi-faceted narrative quite well, I sometimes wondered if the movie would have been a bit more propulsive and compelling if he had simplified and paired down the script just a bit.
But ultimately, it’s far more exciting to see filmmakers shoot for the moon and land just short than to see another safe, well-produced and totally forgettable foray into well-worn territory. And so, I’m grateful for Beyond the Hill, and I’m certainly looking forward to whatever Alper tackles next.
Review | Slow-Moving But Visually Potent no comments
Posted at 8:19 pm in Turkish Cinema
REVIEW:
Nuri Bilge Ceylan Builds a Slow-Moving But Visually Potent Once Upon a Time in Anatolia by Michelle Orange
MOVIELINE SCORE: 8½
Tectonic pacing builds to a series of imperceptible and yet earth-moving moments in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a habeas corpus procedural stretched across two and a half discursive hours. The setup — a policeman, a lawyer, and a doctor head into the Turkish countryside — has the ring of an old joke, something Ceylan never forgets as the groups’s long night and next day wears on. A mix of mordant wit and metaphysical waxing carries the men toward their respective fates, each having more to do with the buried body they are seeking than it first appears.
Technically, the search for the body of a local garage-owner named Yasar is led by a decent but fraying police commissioner named Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan). Sawing Naci’s last nerve is the tormented murder suspect, Kenan (Firat Tanis), whose claim of forgetting exactly where his victim is buried keeps the caravan moving from spot to remote spot all through the night.
Technically, the search for the body of a local garage-owner named Yasar is led by a decent but fraying police commissioner named Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan). Sawing Naci’s last nerve is the tormented murder suspect, Kenan (Firat Tanis), whose claim of forgetting exactly where his victim is buried keeps the caravan moving from spot to remote spot all through the night.
Prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel) is tagging along in case the body actually turns up, as is Doctor Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner). Despite Turkish genes and enigmatically pitted cheeks, everyone eventually agrees that the former bears a resemblance to Clark Gable; the latter enjoys the consensus that he is still a young man with his whole life ahead of him, though he wears the weight of a recent divorce in his handsome face. The only shared opinion about the comically rotund Arab Ali (Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan) is that he should probably talk less and drive more. When he does speak, however, it becomes clear that Arab is the only one of the men with an untroubled perspective on life, a viable blend of rural pragmatism and a lyrical sense of life’s story.
The first half of the film comprises scenes of casual en route quibbling — the dialogue is permeated by the narcissism of small, mostly tribal differences — about who makes better yogurt, who is peeing too often, and who knows the fastest way where. At each hopeful juncture the men pile out of their cars and fall into new configurations. In one of the first stops the doctor and the driver compare moods — where one sees the seemingly pointless night as a Beckett play, the other finds a fairy tale. Later, when the men stop for the night at the compound of a local Mukhtar (Ercan Kesal), the prosecutor tells the doctor the story of a young woman who predicted her own death -— a cherished allegory the doctor dismisses on medical grounds. But if he’s right, the question lingers: What meaning is left in the rational world?
The answer, or one possible answer, or maybe just a refusal of the question, arrives in the form of a woman. The appearance of the Mukhtar’s beauteous teenage daughter (Cansu Demirci) breaks the film’s all-male filibuster, and to welcome her Ceylan rolls out a brocaded cinematic carpet. In contrast to the previous hour’s lighting scheme of cold-beamed, dueling headlights, the girl’s singular, incandescent approach feels celestial. Balancing an oil lamp on a platter of brimming teacups, she lowers the glasses before the innocent and condemned alike. Despite not getting a line (or even a credit in the press notes), she’s meant to embody everything that’s worth living for in a low-down, dirty world.
Such a pity, the men remark, that it will all be wasted on a backwater town. It’s a literal spotlight of a sequence, and I suspect if Ceylan weren’t so expert at stretching his weakness for the obvious across such a vast and blissfully well-composed canvas, it would make a splotchier impact. For this skill he is often compared to Bresson and Antonioni, and if Ceylan shares his characters’ hopes for Turkey’s acceptance into the European Union, I imagine his inclusion in the tradition Pauline Kael called “Come-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties” would be flattering on geographical terms alone. He’s too funny and multi-faceted to be trapped by Euro-arthouse cliché, though, too interested in the absurdist flipside of existential dread.
When the sun comes up and the body is finally, dreadfully unearthed, Anatolia (from the Greek for “sunrise”) is only half over. The more details the men collect and record, the less they seem to know — or want to know — and the further their minds drift to women, who are mentioned often and without warning, as if to confirm the heart of every moody silence.
Silence and sound are deployed as artfully as Ceylan’s sweeping master shots are. In lieu of a soundtrack he contrasts near and far noises, interior voices and exterior perspectives, a layering effect that either culminates or terminates in the final scene, where the music of children playing outside a hospital mingles with the visceral notes of a body being broken down like a roast chicken. It becomes impossible to hear one without the other, hard as you might try.
Review | Once Upon a Time In Anatolia by Manohla Dargis no comments
Posted at 1:21 pm in Turkish Cinema
MOVIE REVIEW
Cinema Guild
A scene from “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.”
One Search for a Body, Another for Meaning
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: January 3, 2012
The story is direct, if the journey less so. A man has been murdered, and a small battalion — a doctor, a prosecutor, a few policemen, several soldiers, diggers with shovels and a transcriber with a laptop — has invaded the countryside with the suspect to dig up the body. The trouble is that the accused, Kenan (Firat Tanis), claims to have been drunk when he committed the murder and can’t remember where he buried the body. And so off the men go in two cars and a Jeep, driving up and down the sensuous, rolling hills of Anatolia, the enormous peninsula that constitutes most of Turkey and which the ancient Greeks called the land of the rising sun.
The sun has nearly set when the men first appear en masse, pulling into a turn in the dirt road where a solitary young tree pierces the parched amber landscape like a shot arrow. Making the most of his wide-screen frame — a format made for landscapes like these and filmmakers as sensitive as this one — Mr. Ceylan initially keeps his distance from the characters by showing them in extreme long shot, a vantage that accentuates how small they are in relation to the wide world enveloping them. This is the first in a series of stops that the men will make as, again and again, they look for the body in a search that reveals far more about the living than about the dead.
Mr. Ceylan soon cuts in for a closer look as he turns his brilliant eye for landscape to the gaunt and rounded, pitted and smoothed faces of his travelers. Much like the stopovers during the search when the men clamber out of their vehicles, these faces — including those of the doctor, Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), and the prosecutor, Nusret (Taner Birsel) — are effectively narrative layovers, breaks in the larger journey. There’s a murder at the story’s center, but as one after another face fills the frame, a tear violently trembling in one man’s eye while the memory of a dead wife hovers in another man’s look, it becomes evident that the greater mystery here is of existence itself.
The title of “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” suggests the work of Sergio Leone, including most obviously Leone’s 1968 masterpiece, “Once Upon a Time in the West.” I don’t want to make strong claims about the influence of that or any other Leone film on “Anatolia,” though the twinned landscapes of this movie’s natural vistas and the ugly beauty of its fantastic faces evoke Leone. (More than a few of Mr. Ceylan’s actors could outgargoyle Leone performers like Jack Elam.) Yet, like most westerns, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” is, among other things, an examination of violence and masculinity, one in which women remain critical if largely off-screen figures, silent if never truly mute.
Mr. Ceylan doesn’t trumpet his ideas, but lets them quietly surface, often through the stories that the men tell one another and that at times take the form of parables. In one, a driver, Arab Ali (Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan), tells the doctor how he likes to drive to the countryside for target practice, just to let off some steam. Enveloped in darkness, the wind rising like sighs, Arab Ali at first registers as a somewhat buffoonish, borderline-dangerous character whose Hobbesian worldview (it’s shoot or be shot) is a reminder that this is, after all, a search for a murdered man. Yet, like the doctor, the prosecutor and the police chief, Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan), Arab Ali proves more complex than he seems because his words are those of a man puzzling through the meaning of life.
Words can fail the men, whose stories of lost wives and other ghosts drench the movie in an acute sense of loss, one that is offset by the effulgence of the natural world, a gift that none seem to see. The dead haunt “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” but so does beauty. At one point, after several futile attempts to find the body, the men drive to a village. There they are greeted by its leader, or mukhtar (Ercan Kesal), who, amid a hospitable meal, tells the travelers that the town needs a new morgue. Most of the young people have left, he says, and when an old villager dies, they beg to see the dead one last time, holding onto a past that fills them with longing. And then the mukhtar’s beautiful daughter joins the men, her face bathed in a light that until then has eluded them.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan; written by Ercan Kesal, Ebru Ceylan and Nuri Bilge Ceylan; director of photography, Gokhan Tiryaki; edited by Bora Goksingol and Nuri Bilge Ceylan; art direction by Dilek Yapkuoz Ayaztuna; produced by Zeynep Ozbatur Atakan; released by the Cinema Guild. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In Turkish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 37 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Muhammet Uzuner (Doctor Cemal), Yilmaz Erdogan (Commissar Naci), Taner Birsel (Prosecutor Nusret), Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan (Driver Arab Ali), Firat Tanis (Suspect Kenan) and Ercan Kesal (Mukhtar)
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Book | Cinema in Turkey REVIEW no comments
Posted at 12:10 pm in Turkish Cinema
Cinespect REVIEW
Lost in Translation
Carlos J. Segura | Dec 08, 2010 |
What makes a film American, French, German, English or, in this case, Turkish? To answer that begs the question: what defines something (or someone) as Turkish? It’s an especially interesting curiosity in this case, particularly when you take into account how young Turkey is as a country (it was founded in 1923) and how many long standing influences stand behind it due to its Ottoman past and how much it is and has been influenced by countries in the west. Savas Arslan’s “Cinema in Turkey: A New Critical History” (336 pages; Oxford University Press, U.S.A.; .00) looks into what defines a film as Turkish, who gets to define a film as such and how Turkey’s production system, particularly in the golden age of its industry known as Yesilcam, operated and where it took inspiration from in terms of its production mode and its filmmaking styles.
Turkey’s film beginnings are relatively late; only sixty feature films were made before 1945 according to Arslan; this left Turkey to consume mainly imported cinema, namely American, Soviet and Western European films. However, once World War II began the number of films from these territories died down, leaving a void that is filled by the importation of Egyptian films. One should add that what makes these import practices notable is that while cinema was developing in Turkey the republican reformers—the elite responsible for shaping the identity of the country into something more modern, Westernized—almost completely ignored the cinema. No film schools or studios were opened by these folks.
Essentially, this means cinema in Turkey was up for grabs in terms of the way its identity was to be molded. And it is with Egyptian melodramas that the identity of Yesilcam, often operating under what Arslan refers to as a “melodramatic modality,” begins to take shape; the popularity of Egyptian films, and the direction of Yesilcam’s identity, were dictated by the very people the republican elite was looking to push by the wayside in terms of their influence on the identity of Turkey: the rural, lower-class filmgoer. With this groundwork laid Arslan establishes the identity of Yesilcam as often being tugged at from two opposing sides. One minute it is pro-Westernization and modernization and the next it’s not. It is because the cinema of Turkey began and evolved according to the spectators of Turkey rather than according to the dictates of the republican elite that Arslan’s thesis is especially interesting. The way the he creates links between Turkey’s history and cultural identity while interweaving these subjects with Turkey’s cinematic history and identity is easily the most interesting and compelling reason to read ”Cinema in Turkey.”
If you’re looking for more of a breezy guide to particular films, stars and directors then you may feel slightly shortchanged. To be clear and specific Arslan does touch on filmmakers, stars, and films. There is an entire chapter devoted to these subjects entitled “High Yesilcam II: Genres and Films.” However, it only accounts for 76 pages of the book. This chapter is more samples from across the board rather than an exhaustive and comprehensive list of examples it seems.
So where does Turkey, or rather Yesilcam, stand on the world stage at the moment? The chapter “Postmorterm for Yesilcam: Post-Yesilcam, or the New Cinema of Turkey” posits that some believe that Turkey is finally finding a filmic identity it can call its own, noting a film called “The Bandit” as the best example of this. Along with this possibility come films by art house or film festival directors like Nuri Bilge Ceylan or directors like Faith Akin (arguably the most famous director of Turkish origin) and Ferzan Ozpetek, which the books points out some have called Orientalists, men guilty of exploiting their roots for western audiences, at worst. At best, they are going past representing any one culture or nation, instead moving over to the realm of world cinema. This is due in large part to the fact that newer generations are becoming more secular, educated, global and interconnected with the rest of the world. Interestingly, the book points out that the new generation of Turkish filmgoers, students or young people for example, find in Yesilcam ironic or so-bad-it’s-good pleasures (not far off at all from how so many of the young see certain films here in America).
As you will note by the content and analysis made in “Cinema in Turkey”, along with it having been pointed out earlier in this piece, the book is not strictly a primer on Turkish films. It is a critical, occasionally challenging work, typical of the kind written with the academic minded reader in mind; the language does occasionally get in the way of the history and ideas Arslan propose. (Arslan is an associate professor of film and television at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.) However, he fixes in and reiterates key words and ideas so often that you ultimately will not find yourself lost.
The final analysis that emerges from this book is of a cinematic identity that always seemed in flux until it came close to finding some kind of an idea of itself in the ‘60s and ‘70s; or at the very least it had the support of spectators that were unified by and validated these films by their attending them. However, due to the rise of television it soon lost support in the ‘80s and because of the rise of urban and educated spectators it is now forced to find a new identity. Filmic and cultural identities seem to be constantly searching for themselves in this instance.
Review | Tete de turc no comments
Posted at 6:32 pm in Turkish Cinema
Tete de turc (France)
Variety Review By JORDAN MINTZER
A Warner Bros. France release of a Aliceeleo Cinema, Aliceeleo, France 2 Cinema production, in association with La Banque Postale Image 3, Sofica EuropaCorp, with participation of Canal Plus, CineCinema, France Televisions, CNC. (International sales: Other Angle Pictures, Paris.) Produced by Patrick Godeau. Executive producer, Francois Galfre. Directed, written by Pascal Elbe.
With: Roschdy Zem, Pascal Elbe, Ronit Elkabetz, Samir Makhlouf, Simon Abkarian, Forence Thomassin, Valerie Benguigui, Monique Chaumette, Laure Marsac, Stephan Guerin-Tillie, Brigitte Catillon, Gamil Ratib, Moussa Masskri, Leo Elbe.
A fast-paced network narrative that ventures into the ever-newsworthy French suburbs, “Tete de turc” (slang for “scapegoat”) scores solid notes for ambition, but doesn’t quite pull itself together in a satisfying manner. Centered around an explosive incident that leaves one benevolent doctor in a coma and one teenager in hiding, thesp-cum-helmer Pascal Elbe’s (“Father and Sons”) wide-reaching scenario shows Gaul’s immigrant populations at the mercy of roaming gangs and abusive cops, living under conditions more akin to Deadwood than to Dijon. Domestic release by Warner Bros. France should yield respectable coin, with Euro and Francophone bookings a strong possibility.
Unlike other recent banlieue films, which are either pure genre exercises (“District B13,” “The Horde”) or pure arthouse studies (“35 Shots of Rum,” “Games of Love and Chance,”), Elbe’s script situates itself between the two, using a thriller framework to tackle the harsh realities currently plaguing the outskirts of Paris, Lyons and Marseilles.
Based on a 2006 incident in which a Senegalese woman was burned alive on a bus by a band of violent teens, the action here is transplanted to France’s less publicized Turkish and Armenian communities, and presents several characters linked together by an attack that occurs in the pic’s opening minutes.
When physician Simon (Elbe) pays a call to a menacing housing project, his vehicle is ambushed by rock-throwing youths, including high schooler Bora (Samir Makhlouf), who launches a Molotov cocktail but then rushes to save the doc before his car explodes. As Simon rests in a coma, Bora tries to avoid exposing himself to the cops and his hot-blooded seamstress mom (Ronit Elkabetz), but he’s soon beaten down by drug dealers angry that the neighborhood is now filled with roving reporters and police patrols.
Meanwhile, Simon’s detective bro, Atom (Roschdy Zem), is conducting his own jaw-breaking investigation to find the culprit, but he’s unaware that a local nutcase (Simon Abkarian) — who lost his wife due to Simon’s attack — is also plotting revenge. As expected from such a dramatic structure, the various plot points eventually tie together, and somebody doesn’t make it out alive.
There’s a swell of different themes (social injustice, family secrets, coming-of-age struggles) presented here, and pic’s major flaw is its attempt to give them all equal coverage rather than concentrating on the stronger ones. Bora’s tale — marked by lively performances from newcomer Makhlouf and Israeli actress-helmer Elkabetz (“The Seven Days”) — is an engrossing depiction of an immigrant youth’s fight to save his skin and reputation while doing the right thing. But the various subplots involving Simon and Atom only hamper the overall narrative flow.
Washed-out, handheld imagery by Jean-Francois Hensgens (“District 13: Ultimatum”) tends to overexpose the tense atmosphere, depicting the suburbs as a virtual no man’s land where walking to school in broad daylight can be a highly treacherous affair.
French title is a play on both Bora’s ethnic origins and the role he serves in the eyes of his family, friends and the larger community.
Camera (color, Panavision widescreen), Jean-Francois Hensgens; editor, Luc Barnier; music, Bruno Coulais; production designer, Denis Mercier; costume designer, Jacqueline Bouchard; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS Digital), Pierre Tucat, Arnaud Rolland, Daniel Sobrino; assistant director, Olivier Coutard; casting, Nicolas Ronchi. Reviewed at UGC Cine Cite Les Halles 4, Paris, April 5, 2010. (In City of Lights, City of Angels Film Festival.) Running time: 87 MIN.
Review | Honey by Semih Kaplanoglu no comments
Posted at 2:01 pm in Turkish Cinema
Honey — Film Review
By Ray Bennett, February 17, 2010 12:09 ET
By Ray Bennett, February 17, 2010 12:09 ET
“Honey”Bottom Line: Beautiful meditation on familial love and the mysteries of nature.
BERLIN — The third entry in Turkish filmmaker Semih Kaplanoglu’s trilogy about a young poet named Yusuf, “Honey” (“Bal”), sees him as a 6-year-old, learning the harsh realities of nature as his beekeeper father disappears in the forest.
Measured and contemplative with a remarkable performance by Boras Altas, then 7, and superlative cinematography by Baris Ozbicer, the film will follow its predecessors in winning great appreciation at film festivals. It may also attract art houses with audiences interested in things bucolic and spiritual.
The relationship between the beekeeper (Erdal Besikcioglu) and the forest is established early in the film as we see how closely the boy follows in his father’s footsteps. The cages for the honey are placed high in tall trees, so his work is very dangerous and almost right away while he is off working alone, a tree snaps and the man is left hanging by a rope.
The film moves back to tell how he came to be there. Kaplanoglu and co-screenwriter Orcun Koksal contrive small and delicate scenes to evoke the strong emotional bond between father and son. They whisper to each other and the boy learns about time and place, the nature of birds, and the names, smells and taste of flowers.
Mother (Tulin Ozen) is a benign but mostly silent presence and only comes to the fore when her husband is believed missing. In a touching scene, the boy who has shown that he hates milk, drinks a glass down unasked just to please her.
The boy’s struggle to read and please his teacher in class contrasts with his assurance in the woods and, while the fate of his father remains unknown, the film conveys powerfully that the boy will continue to know his way.
Kaplanoglu draws a multi-faceted performance from the boy helped greatly by Besikcioglu’s solid presence as the father while the gentle strength of the mother is well captured by Ozen, using small glances to great effect.
Slow-paced and without music other than the calls and cries of the forest creatures, “Honey” suggests that while nature is not full of human kindness, humans may find salvation there.
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival — In Competition
Production: Kaplan Film, Heimatfilm
Director-screenwriter-producer: Semih Kaplanoglu
Cast: Boras Altas, Erdal Besikcioglu, Tulin Ozen
Screenwriter: Orcan Koksul
Director of photography: Baris Ozbicer
Production designer: Naz Erayda
Sales: The Match Factory
Not rated, 103 minutes
Review | Somersault in a Coffin (1997) no comments
Posted at 7:44 pm in Turkish Cinema
Movie Review
Somersault in a Coffin (1997)
FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Outcast Grasps the Bird of Happiness
Life isn’t any less difficult for a homeless man living in Turkey than it is for someone trying to survive on the streets of New York. Dervis Zaim’s ”Somersault in a Coffin” is a compassionate but hopelessly sketchy study of a drifter and petty criminal named Mahsun (Ahmet Ugurlu), who compulsively steals cars, sleeps in abandoned fishing boats and survives on day-old bread.
The compassionate portrait drawn by the Turkish film makes Mahsun almost likable in a sad-sack way. As portrayed by Mr. Ugurlu, a bearded, weatherbeaten actor with a haunted, hollow-eyed look, Mahsun is more comic victim than social predator. An essentially gentle being who endures a vicious beating by the police (he is trussed up and swatted violently on the soles of his feet), Mahsun is touchingly loyal to his fellow outcasts. When one crony dies, he gathers a group of friends for a sentimental graveside tribute in which they sing, drink toasts and pour wine on the earth.
After learning from a television news crew that a local castle has been turned into a tourist attraction housing several dozen peacocks, Mahsun scales its walls and captures one of the beautiful birds, which symbolize the abundant life he will never have. In the course of his daily travels, he also runs afoul of a local criminal boss and befriends a homeless woman who spends her days nodding out on heroin.
If its characters are intriguing, this cinema-verite-style movie never finds its narrative focus. Key incidents in Mahsun’s sad life are insufficiently developed, and the abrupt changes in his relationships remain frustratingly inexplicable. The movie, which New Directors/New Films is showing at the Museum of Modern Art tomorrow at 6 P.M. and Monday at 9 P.M., adds up to little more than a diffuse collection of cinematic snapshots of a colorful loser.
SOMERSAULT IN A COFFIN
Written (in Turkish, with English subtitles) and directed by Dervis Zaim; director of photography, Mustafa Kuscu; edited by Mustafa Presheva; music by Baba Zula and Bab-i Esrar; production designer, Asli Kurnaz; produced by Ezel Akay and Mr. Zaim. Shown tomorrow at 6 P.M. and Monday at 9 P.M. at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, Manhattan, as part of the 27th New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Running time: 76 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Ahmet Ugurlu (Mahsun) and Tuncel Kurtiz (Reis).
Honey | Variety Review by Derek Elly no comments
Posted at 3:47 pm in Turkish Cinema
Berlin
Honey / Bal (Turkey-Germany)
By DEREK ELLEY
The final seg of self-styled Turkish auteur Semih Kaplanoglu’s “Honey, Milk, Egg” trilogy (shot, natch, in reverse order) deals with its blank central character’s childhood in the heavily wooded mountains of Rize province, northeast Turkey. The best-looking of the three and the most conventionally structured, this is still grindingly slow, content-light fare for card-carrying minimalists. Fest sidebars and Euro pubcaster slots loom.
With new d.p. Baris Ozbicer on board, Kaplanoglu appears to have discovered the visual merits of narrow depth of field and foreground framing devices, especially in the many schoolroom scenes and home interiors centered on its lonely protag, 6-year-old Yusuf (Bora Altas). Tyke’s dad, Yakup (Erdal Besikcioglu), is a beekeeper who works deep in the forest; his mom, Zehra (Tulin Ozen), works on a tea plantation.
Shamed at school by his stutter, Yusuf takes pleasure in accompanying Dad on his honey rounds, finding the forest a place of mystery. When his father goes off alone in search of more bees, Yusuf feels isolated and retreats further into his own world.
More info about the small community’s life — and especially its religious/devotional background — is in the pic’s press materials than ever reaches the screen. Dialogue is at a premium throughout, Kaplanoglu typically holds fixed shots way beyond their usefulness, and music is rigorously avoided in attempting to sketch the kid’s sense of wonder and inquiry.
As with “Egg” and “Milk,” the pic’s biggest flaw is that the viewer has no idea what the main characters are thinking or feeling and therefore tunes out emotionally at an early stage. The real star of the picture is writer-director Kaplanoglu — which would be OK if he had anything to share with auds apart from auteurist mannerisms.
Tech package is fine.
A Kaplan Film Prod. (Turkey)/Heimatfilm (Germany) production, in association with ZDF, Arte. (International sales: the Match Factory, Cologne.) Produced by Semih Kaplanoglu. Co-producers, Johannes Rexin, Bettina Brokemper. Directed by Semih Kaplanoglu. Screenplay, Kaplanoglu, Orcun Koksal.
With: Bora Altas, Erdal Besikcioglu, Tulin Ozen.
Camera (color), Baris Ozbicer; editors, Ayhan Ergursel, Kaplanoglu, S. Hande Guneri; art director, Naz Erayda; sound (Dolby Digital), Matthias Haeb; associate producer, Alexander Bohr. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (competing), Feb. 16, 2010. Running time: 104 MIN.
