Monday 14 October 2013

#7: Times and Winds

Beş Vakit
Dir.: Reha Erdem
Turkey 2006
111mins


Turkey is not a country I know. I’ve never visited, or even flown over it, although I have stood for a while on headlands and cliff-sides of the Greek islands of Lesvos and Samos, staring out at the vast country’s Western coastline, acutely aware of the presence of small groups of Greek army personnel keeping watch over their old enemy. It’s been a long time, nearly a hundred years, since the resolution of a conflict that for the rest of the world remains a footnote (or epilogue) to the much more prominent narrative of the First World War. Take a look at a map and you’ll see just how close these eastern Greek territories really are to the Turkish mainland; Lesvos itself seems perpetually poised in between the jaws of a great Turkish bay that might snap shut at any moment.

Part of the reason Turkish cinema appeals to me – and this is very much an appeal to initiation, as Times and Winds is only the third Turkish movie I’ve seen – is the familiarity of the landscape[1]. Having spent many summers rambling around Greek hillsides, somehow both arid and green at the same time and fiercely hot, it’s interesting to see the kinds of places I had so thoroughly associated with the rural practices of Greek Orthodox Christianity just as deeply entrenched with the practices of Islam, with a separation of perhaps only a few dozen miles. It is an almost uncanny experience, if such a term can be applied to landscape. But of course it’s not just the landscape – it’s its cultivation, both in the agricultural sense and the more notional idea of how the character of the land intertwines with the habits and practices of those who work it, who live on it. In Greece one doesn’t need to walk past too many olive groves to find a tiny white church, almost never visited but kept immaculately presented, candles lit, or a cemetery with its ostentatious white marble and fading adornments from the life of the deceased. On the northernmost cliff of the island of Skiathos, only precariously walkable, stands a large wooden cross hundreds of years old; it’s as if the island itself is stretching to thrust its Christian symbolism as high as it can. An announcement to all-comers. In Times and Winds, on an equally precarious clifftop (although this time inland), the four central adolescent characters take turns to recite poetry for each other. Ömer, the son of the Imam, either doesn’t know any or isn’t interested. Instead he bellows one of his hated father’s calls to prayer into the air. The camera observes him from an opposing cliff; the sheer face of the drop and his distant young voice are the abiding impressions of the moment, when a religious imperative is sung out to reverberate across the landscape, or be smothered by the wind.



Quite why Ömer hates his father so much is never properly explained. He is sullen and wilfully self-isolated – in one scene Ömer silently refuses to budge closer to his father as the whole family of four poses for a photograph – and so one gets the impression it’s simply teenage disillusionment. (His father’s status as a religious community leader is also refreshingly underplayed, and Ömer appears to suffer no more on this account than if his father were a businessman or farmhand.) By contrast, his best friend Yakup, with his noticeably unbroken voice, comes across as sweet and friendly; he is also still something of a mummy’s boy and harbours a crush on their schoolteacher that’s not nearly as secret as he might hope. The escapist friendship between these two boys is the centre of the story, but it’s the peripheral goings-on in the village that consolidate the film’s themes of fatherhood and familial responsibility, while granting the viewer an insight into the reason for the unexplainable feelings of discomfort the boys have in themselves, and in the kind of grown men they may one day become.




Ömer’s secretive campaign to prolong his father’s illness is initially the engine of the story. Straight away there is intrigue: is the boy cruel, or will there be a revelation of abuse or maltreatment at some point over the next two hours? For Erdem, this would be far too easy. There is indeed an element of harsh patriarchy, but it comes from an unlikely source. In one of the most revealing of the aforementioned peripheral ‘adult’ story threads – and indeed it’s crucial that much in the village is kept from the children, reinforcing the generational divide and piling on further alienation – Yakup’s father is shown to be something of a runt in his own father’s litter. The old man has handed over his land to his two adult sons for cultivation; both have disappointed him in their failure to work it and respect their inheritance, but the efforts of Yakup’s father are particularly deficient. The grandfather’s dialogue consists entirely of chiding, accusing, and shaming his sons. He orders them to each build a stone wall around their halves of land, with distinctly lopsided results. What could have remained a tragi-comic moment later topples into full-blown inter-generational bitterness as the young Yakup witnesses his grandfather disparagingly kicking down the inferior wall. His father (the intermediary generation) looks on, downcast. At this moment Yakup’s disillusionment intensifies – are we always to remain subservient to our fathers, be they ogre-like or merely pathetic? What Yakup feels here is shame – he is ashamed of his own father. Something clicks into place, narratively speaking. Yakup and Ömer move closer together, become blood brothers before that ritual boyhood act is itself shown onscreen.

At this point I must reassure readers that Times and Winds is not as masculine a movie as I’m making out. In fact the film’s most beguiling presence is the girl Yıldız, whose fascinatingly indistinct character made me suspect that one or both of the boys might benefit somehow from spending more time with her, and not in a kind of pubescent sexual way either. I wanted them to broach the divide, instead of merely yelling distant threats to tell her parents on her after the boys catch the girls out watching and giggling over copulating ponies. When I say her character is indistinct, I don’t mean it’s inadequately drawn – quite the opposite. Where the boys are brooding, inarticulate, confused individuals (as boys their age tend to be), Yıldız is quiet but controlled, purposeful, and caring. And perhaps it’s the thirteen-year-old boy in me that wants Yakup and Ömer to force a revealing confrontation with her. I can remember all too well how strange girls seemed at that age. Strange but appealing. It is through Yıldız that the film’s first truly shocking moment occurs, and the viewer cannot help but feel that she simply doesn’t deserve it. I will spoil no further (but rest assured, it’s nothing morally problematic or harrowing).


The mood conveyed by the film as a whole – the editing, the pace of storytelling, and particularly the impact of the music – is rather a complex presentation. I’m tempted to even call it a ‘proposition’, because it its effect is so curious. While there are plenty of scenes of the children escaping for each other’s company in the wilderness, away from the village elders and the protocols of the schoolroom, the potential for romanticism (in the proper Wordsworthian sense) is constantly checked by Arvo Pärt’s grandiosely sad score. These children play, but they do so wistfully; there is a pervading sense of melancholy. It loads the whole movie down with portentousness, and not in a bad way. In a thinner or more simplistically sketched movie, the use of a score like Pärt’s could flag itself up as emotional shorthand. But again Erdem is too tasteful to allow this to happen; he handles his content wisely, deliberately and with adherence to realism.

However, this realism is stretched, if not entirely broken, by the film’s own signature stylistic move, one that fits the elegiac tone of Pärt’s music perfectly. I am referring to the impressionistic, non-diegetic bird’s-eye shots of the children lying down (asleep?), surrounded and occasionally covered by what’s on the ground around them: Yıldız mostly hidden by purple flowers; Ömer among dust and rubble. These are beautiful shots, no doubt about that, but difficult to interpret. I personally came away with the impression that these moments, placed at intervals throughout the film, are simply more emphatic variations on Erdem’s style of drawing attention to the gravity surrounding his characters. There are shots that point uphill, framing figures against the sky but making sure they’re rooted firmly in the earth. The aforementioned poetry recital scene on the cliff-edge seems to suggest both the danger of the drop and, conversely, the children’s sense of comfort and safety in the mountains they know so well. Several shots follow the children as they navigate the village, tracing their way round in the service of an errand or perhaps some troublemaking. Sometimes it appears that the children themselves are the centres of gravity; the camera is tethered to them, as they in turn remain earthed to the Eastern Mediterranean hills. Erdem’s 2010 film Kosmos features a man with a literally gravity-defying ability to climb: it’s a magic-realist element that allows the camera to dance around the character, picking up all the angles it can in a kind of dynamic interplay with his impossible clambering up trees and across walls. There is no magic-realism in Times and Winds, and so these shots are much calmer as a result, but the principle is evident. (This is another success of Erdem’s work: the style never outraces the possibilities of the story.)



The film unfolds patiently, its themes are complexly handled and not what I’d call “universal” – many of its observations are non-transferable to urban settings, for instance – but it’s these beguiling and moody shots of the children, laden with sadness, innocence and guilt, mostly closed-off to their families, that will keep viewers compelled. There have been plenty of arthouse movies over the last ten or fifteen years in which the minutiae of a childhood existence are studied with such a slight, hands-off approach that one wonders if the director is somehow afraid of interfering with the supposed ‘essence’ and authenticity of their own child actors; thankfully, Times and Winds is not one of them. It doesn’t just ‘observe’ and expect some kind of ‘truth’ to make itself known – it has a properly robust story behind it, a great script, and many fine performances. It doesn’t mind being manipulative, via its score among other things, because it has the courage of its own convictions. It knows the viewer will feel, and that feeling will be of substance. And so a confident, subtle and very modern piece of work then. Rightly lauded. Times and Winds is a keeper.

Incidentally, I don’t know why all that waffle about the Greco-Turkish War was necessary at the beginning of this entry. I suppose the movie has got me thinking rather nebulously, placing myself back on Aegean hillsides and dangerous cobblestones. I don’t have much rurality in my memory banks, so it’s nice when something appeals.

I have also (predictably) failed to update this page in a very long time. I intend to rectify this, but of course not every movie I see I am compelled to write something about. The Bourne Identity, for instance – I saw that for the first time recently and it’s good fun, but it doesn’t make me want to dive in. Another one was the 1968 rape-and-torture-fest WitchfinderGeneral: a classic piece of grim British censor-baiting fare that nevertheless left me unable to find an angle. And I did want to write about that one. (Perhaps I’ll have better luck with Blood on Satan’s Claw.) Brighton’s own Cinecity Film Festival is upon us at the beginning of November, so I’ll hopefully be able to file some shorter pieces about some of those screenings. (And without the ability to include screenshots! But that’s the most funnest part! Sulk.)

Anyway, if you are still reading, thank you. Feel free to argue and call me an idiot who can’t read a simple Turkish arthouse drama. Times and Winds has so much more to it than this entry attempts to deal with, but as always, I’m not claiming to be exhaustive. And I’m trying to avoid spoilers too, because Unsequence is a place to recommend. Until next time, which won’t be too long, I promise…





[1] At least, in the country’s sunnier regions. Reha Erdem’s 2010 film Kosmos is set in the far grimmer climes of the snowy and troubled north-eastern border states.