Müll im Garten Eden (2012)

Çamburnu, ett samhälle i Turkiet vid Svarta havet. Myndigheterna har tillåtit en nedgrävd soptipp (deponi) att inrättas här, på platsen där en koppargruva en gång funnits. Regissören Fatih Akin (Auf der anderen Seite, Gegen die Wand) har själv (några av) sina rötter på den här orten, och i Müll im Garten Eden dokumenterar han den absurda process som drar igång när invånarna gör allt för att förhindra en miljökatastrof och ett tickande (eller snarare rinnande och luktande) hälsoproblem. Deras möda, de olika rättsprocesser som initieras, tycks mest gagnlösa och här får tittaren en liten inblick i ett land som har skrotat rättssamhället. Filmen består av intervjuer med borgmästaren och med olika representanter för både soptipps-företaget och myndigheter. Men framför allt vill Fatih Akin ge en inblick i Çamburnu, i den vantrivsel som tilltar när stanken från tippen blir bara värre och när man oroar sig för om det är en vettig idé att odla något eller att fiska i havet. För tippen var ju inte det kontrollerade ingenjörsmästerverk som myndigheterna utlovat. Lakvattnet far iväg åt alla håll. Det stinker, det svämmar över, ekosystemen förskjuts, en tank för dräneringsvatten exploderar. Företagets representanter kläcker ur sig saker som "jamen det är ju bara så att det har regnat lite och därför svämmat över", "det löser sig nog av sig självt". Ansvar, det vill ingen ta. Akin har intervjuat flera ungdomar som säger att de inte längre vill bo kvar, de äldre är bittert medvetna om avfolkningen. I en scen ser vi några gubbar strida om politik. Det här är Erdoğans fel, utbrister en, och får mothugg och blir kallad "terrorist". Filmen kom ut 2012, då var Erdoğan statsminister och hade varit det sedan länge. Müll im Garten Eden är ingen fulländad film (den slits liksom åt olika håll och blir inte helhjärtad), men den är ett intressant tidsdokument och en viktig plädering för möjligheten att kunna påverka sin egen närmiljö. Och så ger den just en vink om allt som är åt helvete med rättssystemet i Turkiet. Fast filmen är inte ute efter att förklara något (det fanns för mig som är okunnig om Turkiet många förvirrande frågor), utan mer visa hur olika situationer fortskrider. I några scener får det absurda komma in, som när parfymflaskorna åker fram för att ta bort lukten.

Müll im Garten Eden, 2012
Regi: Fatih Akin.

Honey (2010)

Honey is the third film in Semih Kaplanöglu's brilliant childhood trilogy that starts with a middle aged poet and ends with a curious little boy. Visually, this is a stunning effort; the camera instantaneously not only establishes glorious-looking rural landscapes - a fictional world is quickly established - a sensually heightened world at that: the birds are chirping, the wind is breezing in the trees. It's strange how the film balances a contemplatively dreamy tone with ordinariness. With regards to the dreaminess, I come to think of the Spanish directors Carlo Saura and Victor Erice - they share the attention to the child's perception and exploration of the world s/he has at hand, a world that is often disconcerting. The resemblance to these Spanish directors is hard to forget when I watch the camera saunter around in the family house, a dimly lit place, a place of shadows and light.

In this case, the six-year old child is worried about his father, a beekeeper, who has disappeared. We see the boy's close, tender relationship with his father; they share a way of talking, a way of being silent, a way of putting shoes on. It is startling and rare to see this kind of quiet intimacy. He is angry with his mother, who tries to comfort him. He walks alone in the woods. At school, he wants to be the boy who earns the Star for excellent performance in reading. But he is not very good. The kid stammers, and through his stammering presence, the grief is almost too much too see. Kaplanöglu works with scenes and rhythm, rather than narrative. His films - the trilogy which I have seen - have a placid pacing which also sometimes harbors ruptures and abrupt cuts. But the feel of the images come first; the progression from one thing to another is poetic, rather than conventionally 'rational'. He is not, I think, a director who seeks to impress his viewer, suffocating us in stunning beauty. The aesthetics of Honey is starkly rooted in everyday life. For this reason, the way he focuses on nature never gets clichéd; the film sticks closely to the kid's perspective, his exploration, his fears. One example of this is when the kid sneaks out on a nightly walk to look at the rain. These are, for me, completely engrossing scenes.

I'd like to watch this film again - I am sure I will be able to make out new dimensions and appreciate new things in the rich images if I watch it a second time.

Milk (2008)

Milk is the second part of Semih Kaplanoglu's autobiographical trilogy. The films are loosely related, and a ideosyncratic aspect of the trilogy is that the story is told backwards - the first film is about a grown man, the second about a teenager, the third about a child. The main character, Yusuf, we saw in Egg is here an aspiring poet. He lives in a small child with his mum and as he did not make it in the entrance exam for the university he has to settle for another kind of life. This is not easy. He makes a little money selling milk. He's in love with a girl who is also having an affair with another man. The film deals with the young person's ordeals in trying to get clear about the future. A political dimension of the film appears when it is evident that Yusuf is supposed to do his military service. Yusuf seems to loathe the idea of joining - this is not the life he wants. Anyway, he is not forced to go because he is an epileptic. He is a dreamer, a loner. But somehow, the film manages to dodge almost all clichés about dreamy young men - Kaplanoglu offers us a gentle, yearning perspective that perceptively captures what it is like to worry about the big choices one has to do in life. One of the central relationships here is the one between Yusuf and his mother, whom he adores - he even writes poems about her. Oedipal drama? Well, not in the way you expect it, I think. The boy is eager to be the good son, the worthy son - and seems to fear that he is failing also in this respect. The mother has met a new man, an official - this changes their relationship and we see some kind of resentment in the son. The son feels rejected, perhaps humiliated.

The visual style of Milk is stunningly beautiful, but not in an overwrought way. Kaplanoglu's film is at times so striking that it is difficult to watch. The first scene is so eerie that one is almost jumping out of one's chair - I will not say more about it here. I know nothing about rural Turkey so I cannot say anything about that, but it is the surroundings that stand out. One segment that is hard to forget is a visit that Yusuf pays at his friends job. The friend work in a mine. But also he is a poet. The two talk. It's a scene full of sadness - crushed dreams, longings, fears.

Egg (2007)

Egg is the first film in Semih Kaplanoglu trilogy about a poet's life. Curiously, the trilogy moves "backwards" in time so that the first film explores the middle aged poet's, Yusuf's, life. He has returned to his village, where he hasn't been for a long time. His mother is dying and his cousin is now living in her house. They share the house in a slightly uncomfortable way. Yusuf gradually seems to settle in, and begins to remember what life used to be like. His cousin tells him that his mother had a wish; a lamb is to be sacrificed to her. Yusuf, an urban type, resists, but then succumbs. At the village in which they are to pick out a lamb to sacrifice the two bond in a new way.

Kaplanoglu's first film in the trilogy is rooted in a rather realistic tradition, even though there are many poetic excusions. The film dwells on spaces and sounds and lets us know about the relationships through hints. The mother's house is central. A shabby, crumbling place, but also a place of many memories, most of which we can only imagine and guess at. Egg is a slow film without the slowness appearing to be a trick or mere style.

The trilogy consists of Egg, Milk and Honey. These are titles loaded with symbolism, of course. The films can be said to be, too, but that would easily distort their very earth-bound quality. Take, for example, the lenthy account of the ritual. A lamb is to be picked out. But it turns out the herd has gone missing. The ritual is immersed in the main character's own exploration of the place, a place he encounters with a mix of alienation and curiosity. Also the relation with the dying mother is similarly earth-bound. There are distances to be crossed, and communation to try out. In their relationship, we see the son's doubts about himself, and where life has taken him. He is a failed poet that has been working in a bookshop in the city for many years. His mother lives in a rural place with other ways of life, other rhytms of life. Egg establishes the gentle and soul-searching tone that characterizes the trilogy as a whole. I would like to see the entire trilogy again: these are films that it takes time to let sink in. There are many layers of the cinematic approach and often I felt myself so amazed by a specific image or scene that I felt I was missing some other aspect.

Climates (2006)

It's winter in Turkey. A rather self-centered college professor has broken up with his girlfriend and leads a lonely existence in Istambul. Too lonely - he realizes it was a mistake to part with her. The girlfriend works in the television business and has gone to the eastern part of the country to produce a TV series. The college professor sets his mind on talking to her again.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan made the excellent Uzak and Climates is very similar, both in the subjects it explores and the style it is immersed in. Ceylan is interested in the distance between people, the friction, the silence. He uses wintry landscapes to augment the icy atmosphere of the story and even though that sort of embellishment is likely to have ended up in overwrought cheese somehow the film's sober tone saves it from sentimentality. I mean, Ceylan even gets away with showing people looking at ruins without this becoming too much a painfully obvious metaphor for the kind of emotions the film looks into. (The two main roles are played by the director and his wife - I didn't know that until afterwards) Ceylan looks at how specific situations evolve. How people struggle with words, how they talk past each other, how they are awkward or lonely in one another's company. Ceylan does not have to show us the history of this couple's resentment towards each other. All scenes hint at that, and we need no more to understand that there are problems of many different kinds between them that go way back. The camera focuses on faces that express too much all at once or face that are hard to read. Climates may be a pessimistic film, but it is far from world-weary. The second half of the film is strikingly beautiful, and sometimes painful to watch. Ceylan is a master of simplicity and I hope he will make many more films.

Times and Winds (2006)

Reha Erdem's Times and Winds is a magnificently shot movie about the small wonders of growing up. The story is set in a rural community in Turkey. The film focuses on the gap between children and adults. Not that there are any major dramatic outbursts here, but there are clearly many tensions going on here. The children in the film are used to a quite free life, running around in the hills, playing games. Some of their parents try to set up limits and rules but this project seems to be in vain. Times and Wind works with small gestures: instead of showing ruptures and resolutions, it hints at problems and builds up a sinister feeling. Erdem restricts himself to crafting a series of tableaux - the kids lives play out in ordinary situations involving anger, sexuality and friendship. One of the children has a crush on his teacher, another is mad at his dad, the imam. A girl is blamed by her mother for being a good-for-nothing, while her father takes a more friendly attitude to her. He lets the camera tenderly follow the hourly changes in nature, from morning to noon to afternoon to the twilight hours but this has nothing to do with romanticism. Nature is what it is, and humans live with it. The style of the film is interesting: static images of natures are contrasted with very camera work tracking the activity of the characters. I like this approach, especially as it seems not to be bogged down with some upfront thesis about nature/human (but yes, it does contrast change/repetition).  - - Sometimes Times and Winds tend to be a bit unfocused, but all in all, this was a balanced and elegant little film that choses to focus on the everyday rather than the extra-ordinary.

Black and White (2010)

Think about directors like Rohmer. He managed to make a string of easy-going movies about everyday life - in a very bourgeois setting. I can stand his movies, well, I happen to adore some of them. But it takes a good director to pull off that kind of movie, and I'm afraid Black and White, directed by Ahmet Boyacioglu wasn't one of these films, even though it had its strong aspects, and even though its offbeat focus on ordinary life was charming, even moving at times. The problem was just that the film remained lofty, conventional - I was never overwhelmed, worried or taken aback - this film played it safe, and the effect it had on me was slight. Most of the story takes place in a bar in which a group of loyal patrons hang out, drink and philosophize about love and life. At first, they seem to be a miserable bunch, but things brighten up, and the message of the film is that life goes on, no matter how static it may have seemed up 'til now - change is always possible. After the film (screened at Sodankylä film festival) the director explained that most of the characters are based on people he knows. It is obvious that these portraits contain a great deal of affection. But for all this, the film never takes off, there is no real urgency there, no lasting images; despite his aspiration to keep the film as close to reality as possible, the big issue I had with it is that it felt too general, too much craving for stories that everybody could relate to and recognize.   

Pandora's box (2008)

Pandora's box is a very good, yet flat-out difficult, film. No, it's not what you think. This is not a film that is difficult to watch because of some screwed-up sense of logic or trying to make sense of five-minute takes of watching a guy eat ice-cream. Rather, this is difficult in the way it is difficult to think about certain memories or the difficulty of being present in a situation. Yeşim Ustaoğlu's film revolves around three siblings living in Istambul who take care of their ill mother after the latter having suddenly disappeared from her home in the mountains. We see the siblings, and their mother, dealing with the situation, and the inevitable tensions arising between them. One strand of the film is the relationship of a mother and her teenage son, who doesn't really feel at home at his mother's place. Surprisingly, he develops an understanding with his grandmother, who doesn't seem to know who he is.

Ustaoğlu works with understatements and capturing a sense of everyday disorientation. Lots of the scenes are quiet. In this way, she* doesn't place the Alzheimer-afflicted woman in a world of her own, ontologically secluded from everybody else. Instead, Ustaoglu seems to emphasize the ways in which we become estranged from the world in many different ways and that we react differently to many things (one scene: the elderly woman makes an attempt to release herself on the carpet, one of the sisters angrily scolds her brother for laughing). Therefore, this is not really a film about Alzheimer's. It's a film about openness and rejection, grief and memory - about the realization of a shared predicament and a shared future. There are a few unnessecary scenes, the omission of which would have made the film a slightly more cohesive affair (how the son is presented). Ustaoğlu's shares an interest in the ugly-beautiful alleys, ports and apartments of Istambul that Nuri Bilge Ceylan so impressively conjures up in Uzak.

Afterwards, googling, I realized I had seen another one of Ustaoğlu's movies, Journey to the sun.

* Shame on me! Before doing some research, I assumed the director was a man...

Gegen die Wand (2004)

Even on my third viewing, Gegen die Wand has lost nothing of its power. On paper, this would look like melodrama: suicide attempts, alcoholism, violence, a devout Muslim family, an arranged marriage, more violence, drugs, sex. But in Fatih Akin's hands, and because of the brilliant performance of the actors, this movie does not appear one bit overwrought. Partly, this is due to the brilliant performance of all actors. Secondly, under the surface of the sometimes brash build-up of a story, Akin is a careful enough writer & director to settle for subtle complexity. His characters are not moulded to be representatives of anything; gender, culture, generation. Mark my words, Akin did not make a movie about "a culture clash" (The German Way of Life vs. The Turkish Way of Life). In a brilliant way, his film opposes all such stereotypes (think, for example, about the scene towards the very end, in which Cahit, uncomfortable with talking bad Turkish, speaks to Sibel's sister in English)

Most of all, Gegen die Wand is a reflection on complicated love and unstoppable lust for life. When you thought you knew how to pinpoint one character, you realize that you were wrong. I don't see this as an artistic ploy - it's just how Akin works.

Just one example of how good this films works on a level of details: Cahit and his "uncle" pay a visit at Sibel's parents' to ask for her hand. Cahit brings a box of confectionary. While "uncle" presents the delicate case, Sibel's father resentfully chews the candies, arms crossed. That scene, with its bleak lighting, expresses a quiet, dark sense of humor. Even small expressive eruptions, like the chewing of confectionery, is painfully impregnated with meaning.

Akin is not afraid of heightened emotions. His use of music, for example, has everything to do with expressing a certain state of mind (he even has the different segments end with a mournful orchestra performance). But what is essential here is that this musical contribution is not a lame attempt at filling out the gaps on-screen, puffing up a scene so as to keep up the illusion. The music is the film; the relation between music and image is seamless.

There are some questionable elements in the film, too. What is going on in the multidue of scenes in which we witness Sybil's & Cahit's fits of destructive behavior? Afterwards, when some of the film's mojo has waned, I find myself asking: isn't there almost too much attitude in those scenes? If acts of violence become mere vehicles for yet another burst of strong emotion in an everlasting human tragedy, then there is reason to sober up and ask what's going on. Yes - and no. I might be inclined to say that there is something fishy here - but at the same time these scenes are not only outbursts of violence; it is not as if violence leave no mark on the characters (and the viewer). The scene in which Sibel, raped by an opium-dealer, beats up a pack of guys (who offer their services), and is severly beaten up by them in turn, is a scene I will never be able to forget. Akin works brilliantly with emotional volatility here (and elsewhere, too): anger, disappointment, rage. It would be wrong to say that this is simply about "emotions" (& "emphasizing", whatever that is supposed to mean). In a few short minutes, Akin encapsulates an entire world of gender oppression, honor-talk, humiliation, pride - and, most important of all, defiance.

Uzak (2002)

Yusuf goes to Istambul looking for a job on a ship. He lives with his cousin Mahmut, a cynical photographer who seems to enjoy watching Tv more than anything else. Mahmut does not seem happy about having a guest in his home. He broods over his ex-wife. He watches Stalker when Yusuf is in the room, just to put on some porn when his cousin ambles off. They have a strained relationship. The prospect of getting a job is not really good for Yusuf, so he walks around on the streets, and bothers Mahmud with his presence in the apartment. To a great extent, this is a film about space. The title, Uzak, means distance. Yusuf's and Mahmut's relationship is not so much unraveled by words, but rather we see what they feel about each other in how they react to shared space; damp socks on a radiator, traces of cigarette ash, an empty corridor. The presence of the other is, for the most part, mediated through the belongings of the other. But none of them seems really at home in Mahmut's apartment. We also see these two characters on their own, in cafés, checking out women, walking. And the urban locations seem no less bleak than Mahmut's tidy apartment.

There are many scenes that have a perfect set up and atmosphere - along with a quiet sense of humour. In one of them, Mahmut takes Yusuf with him on a trip on which he is supposed to work. They drive by a scenic little village with fluffy sheep on a hill. At first, Mahmut deliberates over whether they should stop so he could take a picture, but then he says in a gruff voice, "I don't bother". There are several scenes involving smoking. We see Yusuf smoking on Mahmut's balcony. He listens to the wind-chimes and gazes out over the city.
Uzak overstates nothing. It's a good film in that relies on the medium. People don't have to mull their feelings over in psychologically explicit dialogue. (The scenes involving half-stalking female strangers might approximate the overstated) The images of snow-laden Istambul are very beautiful and for the most part, Ceylan's use of long shots work. After I finished watching Uzak I realized there was no music except for the sounds of the specific locations of the film.