Sour Apples (Ekşi Elmalar)

Written and directed by Yilmaz Erdoğan

Featured March 30 & April 8 at the 17th Annual Boston Turkish Film Festival

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

Sour Apples is a modern-day Shakespearean comedy written and directed by Yilmaz Erdoğan, who also stars in it as Hakkâri’s vain and overbearing mayor. It’s 1977, and the mayor has just lost his election to a third term, but until his dying day he will remain “the mayor,” severe and unsmiling, dressed in tailored clothes, and driven about by his manservant, Yusef.

We know this is a lighthearted comedy from the opening’s fun, farcical music, which also plays between scenes. It’s snowing outside at the mayor’s house, which sits in front of a jagged mountain peak in southeastern Turkey. Inside the dusky parlor, men listen to the election results with their candidate seated before them as if on a throne. They kiss his hand as they leave, expressing regret for his loss.

Turkey’s turbulent politics of the 1970s and 80s thread through the background of this heartwarming love story, narrated by the mayor’s youngest daughter Muazzez. She recalls the family’s past to her aged father, who can no longer silence or punish her for what she tells him because he has Alzheimer’s. We hear how her city was known for two things: the mayor’s apple orchards and the mayor’s daughters.

And oh, what daughters!—Türkan, Safiye, and Muazzez. Their adolescent beauty, flowing dresses and tresses, laughter and gaiety, and conniving plots to get the men they want rather than their father’s choices, launch the movie in its Shakespearean vein. The character Sino carries letters and messages between the illicit lovers; the grotesque, traveling merchant, Etar, brings gossip to the women; and lovable, blundering Hatip, in love with Safiye, can be counted on for laughter.

The women’s lives are so restricted that Muazzez hasn’t learned to read or write, and yet this distressing state of women is treated in a parodic way, keeping the story playful. When Muazzez spies Özgür—a true Romeo—it’s love at first sight, with humor woven into the lovers’ action and dialogue. Özgür comes from cosmopolitan Ankara and asks Muazzez: How can boys see girls in this town? She answers: You marry them.

The story progresses and we watch Muazzez’s two older sisters go through exactly that process of marrying before meeting their patriarch’s choices for them. The girls’ mother Ayda is like one of the sisters, having been betrothed at age fourteen. She often joins in her daughters’ merrymaking and whispered schemes, showing how the women share a secret world of romance novels, movie star pin-ups, and natural urges they have to hide from their male authority.

As the years pass, the unemployed mayor can’t afford his lifestyle any longer, and if he marries off his last daughter, his wife won’t be able to handle the housework on her own. He suggests he take a second wife so Muazzez can marry, but leaves the decision to Ayda and Muazzez. This is a wonderful moment in the movie, tense and meaningful for both the women and the audience. It’s also the film’s turning point into less comedy and more poignancy over life’s losses. However, in keeping with its Shakespearean tradition, the story has placed key props along the way—the green apples and the characters’ traits—that lead to a perfect, climatic ending. All’s well that ends well, with much life experienced along the way.

Cast: Yilmaz Erdoğan (Mayor), Farah Zeynep Abdullah (Muazzez), Songül Öden (Türkan), Sükran Ovali (Safiye), Seher Devrim Yakut (Ayda), Sükrü Özyildiz (Özgür), Fatih Artman (Hatip), Ersin Korkut (Sino).

-->

Rosso Istanbul

Dir. by Ferzan Ozpetek

At the17th Boston Turkish Film Festival

March 24 & 31, 2018

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Rosso Istanbul, directed by Ferzan Ozpetek and based on his 2013 novel by the same name, is a cinematic meditation on his hometown and on life. Reality is not as pretty as our dreams, the movie tells us. This review may have a spoiler.

Similar to Ozpetek’s Turkish baths movie of twenty years ago, Steam, this new film conveys the inner side of human lives, and both movies include endings with death. Both are also set in Istanbul but in different eras, Rosso Istanbul in today’s excess of wealth and lifestyle. Current music blends with traditional, evocative Eastern sounds and their feel of the elusive past, the score by Giuliano Taviani and Carmelo Travia.

The movie is slow because it reflects on individual life experience, from childhood relationships that impact psychology to successful careers that implode, like Deniz’s. Life inevitably deteriorates, but it’s a person’s accumulated memories that lead to later-life depression or despair.

Briefly, a London book editor, Orhan Sahin (Halit Ergenc), returns to his hometown, Istanbul, to help his old friend Deniz Soysal (Nejat Isler), a famous filmmaker, finish his autobiography. Orhan’s tragic face and the film’s other hints about his past eventually reveal the cause for his leaving Turkey twenty years before. Mostly silent, he speaks with his large blue eyes, and panning on all of the protagonists’ faces—their long looks at each other—is overdone. In real life friends don’t hold each other’s gazes for so long.

Deniz’s dissipated face and manic behavior juxtapose Orhan’s passivity. The stunning Neval (Tuba Buyukustun) forms a female addition to the relationships, which also include Deniz’s mentally tortured lover Jusef (Mehmet Gunsur). Neval appears less depressed than the three men, until she says: “But isn’t everyone unhappy?”

That line could be a subtitle for the movie: People are unhappy.

Deniz disappears on the first night of Orhan’s arrival and the rest of the movie takes on suspense about where he is, while the characters’ back stories slowly fill in. Jusef’s angry character is the best role, partly because his gaze never lingers too long on any of his adversaries.

Audiences may appreciate Rosso Istanbul’s study of life—human life—or they may ask: What was the point of this movie? And the ending might disappoint them—it’s ambiguous. Yet that ambiguity also offers a freedom to interpret meaning, which works well with this dark, meditative genre.

The Bosporus’s upscale Karakoy shoreline is the main setting of the film and plays a key role in the central characters’ lives and the movie’s ending. As the story winds up, Jusef tells Orhan that he and Deniz used to challenge each other to swim across the strait. Jusef succeeded many times, despite the dangerous currents, but Deniz never made it more than a few yards before turning back. The audience therefore assumes Deniz, drunk the last time anyone saw him, took on the Bosporus feeling omnipotent, or he committed suicide. Soon after, Jusef drowns in the waters, probably suicide. In the last scene, Orhan sheds his clothes, dives into the water, and begins swimming with a strong stroke. The screen goes black.

            Over the course of the movie, Orhan works through his past and frees himself from his dead condition of twenty years. But what is his future? Does he have a new beginning in Istanbul? Does he dive into the Bosphorus because life is dark and meaningless, or does he dive in feeling empowered to reach the other side, a symbol of his new strength? The viewer must decide an ending to this movie’s sad, but realistic depiction of life.

Simulation

Directed by Abed Abest

Featured at the Boston Festival of Films from Iran
January 4–17, 2018
Showtimes: mfa.org

Actor, writer, and director Abed Abest’s Simulation opens in an avant-garde black-box theater, with the cast stepping into the spotlight and subtitles identifying their coming roles: Father, Elham, Maryam, the four protagonists Abed, Vahid, Aris, and Esi, and various prison officials. Eerie, thumping, surreal sounds play throughout the movie, with crackling electricity and blown fuses later on.

Everything in the black box is stripped down and unnatural, including the lighting. The principal prison set consists of two-by-fours painted in lime green that create a spare framework of several rooms, in one of them a prison official’s desk and a phone. The other main set is the businessman Esi’s living room with slick green couches. All of the characters wear the same neon blue shoes and all vehicles are giant, menacing, white Land Rovers. The sets are ultra-sterile in contrast to the arguing male protagonists and the strange background sounds.

On the screen, we watch experimental theater more than standard film; the visual, auditory, and scene-setting novelties, along with the rapid-fire dialogues and mind-bending plot could be handled just as effectively on the stage. Even the aseptic, clone effect of the Land Rovers (similar to the cloned quality of the characters in blue shoes) could be creatively rendered. But then, theater has often crossed with film, and Simulation offers original and provocative material.

Filmgoers who like Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Inception will like the mind-teasing plot of Simulation; and theatergoers who sit on the edge of their chairs during Sartre’s No Exit will also be fascinated by this film. What do these genres have in common? Plot, concept, and subject more than sympathetic characters and traditional story line. Both are outside ordinary human life and exist in a time capsule of skewed and hellish consciousness. The “contrivance” in these creative works succeeds if the audience is able to watch what unfolds without thinking about the contrivance, but instead entering fully into the abstract sphere and its premise. Simulation succeeds in this, never losing the attention of its audience, who will also enjoy pondering the manifold meanings of the title. 

One of the notable achievements of the movie is its presentation of young men hanging out, looking for some night fun, and how they talk to each other—the content and style of their conversations. The material is revelatory about men’s insipid repartee and how with alcohol the banality escalates to fights and police involvement. It’s not the action the men hoped for, but there’s something innate in their chemistry that needs an outlet for force.

Tehran Taboo

Dir. Ali Soozandeh

Featured at The Boston Festival of Films from Iran

January 4–17, 2018

Showtimes: mfa.org

 

Tehran Taboo, a robocoped film written and directed by Iranian-born Ali Soozandeh, succeeds on many levels—story, filming technique, and thought-provoking issues, particularly those involving women living in religious Islamic societies like Iran. For audiences from Western democracies who take in the story at face value, a second, later response might also arise: Wait, is Tehran really such a moral-authority police state, a reign of terror for its citizens? Or was the film slightly satiric? No, the film is honest and presents true conditions. It’s reminiscent of Eastern European literature during the communist era, which read like theater of the absurd, but captured the state of a tyrannized society.

The film’s opening scene takes place inside a car where a prostitute named Pari (Elmira Rafizadeh) takes cash to give the driver a blow job, while he’s driving. Her six-year-old mute son Elias sits in the backseat and presumably accompanies his mother regularly on jobs, making us wonder if that’s the reason he’s mute. The blow job comes to a jolting stop when the driver sees his daughter holding hands with a man in the street. All hell breaks loose at this breach of code.

Soon after, Pari finds an easier way to survive by becoming the mistress of a corrupt judge who has been rejecting her petition for a divorce for years for lack of her husband’s signature. In the film, women need their husbands’ or parents’ signed permission for any civil transaction, from taking a job to dealing with banks to getting a divorce. The judge sets Pari up in a nice apartment, and we soon meet the other protagonists in the story who also have apartments in the building, causing their lives to intersect. Babak is a young musician making a living in a sex-hot disco. One night he has bathroom sex with a pretty woman named Donya, and the next day finds out she has to get her virginity back or her “Hulk Hogan” financé will kill her and probably Babak as well. Thus begins Babak’s odyssey to help Donya out of her trouble, which increasingly becomes his.

Once installed in her new apartment, Pari zeroes in on her neighbors, a lovely young woman named Sara and her traditional husband, a banker. We learn they’ve been trying for years to have a baby and finally Sara’s pregnant. Her husband’s parents live with them, the father retired and vegging in front of pornography on the TV, and the mother an unpleasant busy-body. Pari makes friends with the family so that Elias can have a babysitter when she’s out servicing the judge. Sara and Pari share a few meaningful chats that bring them closer as women, despite the disparity in their social positions, for Sara has a college degree but is prevented from teaching by her husband. Because of the babysitting, Sara and Elias also develop a relationship, as if Sara’s restricted world leaves her only the emotional level and company of a six-year-old.

Soon Pari finds out about Babak and Donya’s problem and tries to help each of them. We register that a social pariah like Pari has more freedom to operate in the outside world than a sheltered wife like Sara. Sadly, Pari isn’t able to help Sara in a sudden, personal predicament, which concludes the movie on an ominous note.

The film’s use of roboscoping—animation traced over real-life footage—heightens our audience fascination, for we realize how close we feel to the characters and their problems despite their “unreal” portrayals. Much sensitivity and humanity went into creating these characters, and the irresolution of their nightmarish situations—the darkness, even hopelessness, of their lives—conveys deeply. The film leaves us pondering how a societal morass with ingrained sexual contradictions and hypocrisies can ever change? No answers are given as none exist at this time, but showing the condition through Tehran Taboo is an important step forward.

Breath

Directed by Narges Abyar

Boston Festival of Films from Iran

January 4–17, 2018, at the Museum of Fine Arts

Showtimes: mfa.org

Writer-director Narges Abyar’s Breath offers an unusually rich tapestry of childhood—that of a girl in Iran during the years 1977–1979, when the Shah is ousted and Ayatollah Khomeini takes power. Second-grader Bahar (Sareh Nour Mousavi) narrates the story—how the family moved from Tehran to rural desolation because of her father’s deadly asthma. Granny (Pantea Panahiha) raises the four children who are motherless. This Granny is a nasty, child-beating witch to whom Bahar occasionally says, “I love you,” and who now and then utters the same words to Bahar. This complex relationship of a parent figure tyrannizing children with “love” in the mix happens everywhere, but our intimacy with Bahar’s trauma raises the horror of crimes against children to a real-life level. In contrast, Bahar’s father Ghafour (Mehran Ahmadi), a truck driver, couldn’t be a more thoughtful and loving parent, and though he’s part of the rallies shouting “Down with the Shah”—presumably religiously conservative—he also encourages his daughter’s reading and top grades in school. At the same time, as the film progresses, Granny admonishes Bahar to keep a distance from her favorite cousin and playmate Taher, because she’s mature now and can’t be seen with boys. We’re shown how girls’ instructions are full of confusing inconsistencies: study with ambition to become, but separate yourself from men, hide behind a scarf, take an inferior role, accept male abuses.

Bahar’s imagination populates the movie as she narrates folkloric tales that appear in black-and-white animation on the screen. The lurid books she sneaks from her uncle’s collection also appear in these animated forms as she reads them in voice over. The stories come naturally to this talented child, but they also provide an escape from her troubled world of Granny and her fear that her father might die from an asthma attack. Later, the Iran-Iraq War breaks out, and Ghafour joins the army, leaving the children with Granny.

It’s a marvel to watch a child actor play the emotional vicissitudes of Bahar. She must embody terror when facing the black-clad, evil-faced Granny swinging her stick; she must soar in spirits on a sky-gliding swing; repose in her dreamy inner sanctum of stories; play the competitive and bullying games of children; and reveal adoration for her father, along with anxiety over his health. It’s a spectrum of inner and outward emotions handled remarkably by Mousavi. Among the other principal roles, Pantea Panahiha as Granny superbly incarnates the she-demon of fairy tales, which nicely complements the movie’s premise of a little girl’s inner fantasy life.

Culturally, Breath is like a rich vein in a gold mine, providing a view of another world in another era, evoking every sensory detail from food to music to setting and daily life with historic rituals and dress. The film also offers an excellent contrast to another movie in the festival, Tehran Taboo, which depicts a chaotic, twenty-first century Tehran, forty years after the revolution. Although this urban cultural chaos happens globally, its intricacies in this film pertain to Iran.

Breath is long, some scenes could have been edited out, including one or two of the animated stories and the final epilogue. The ending in general, with its dirge-like music, makes a dramatic war statement that has more to do with the lightly sketched-in political backdrop than the intense family story, the childhood biography, that defines the movie. War does affect Bahar’s life, including the sound of gunfire and bombs and the need to run to a neighbor’s basement for shelter. Yet, the conclusion of the movie focuses on the war thread and not the dominant themes of the movie: family relations and a child’s experience in both reality and the realm of the imagination. Small quibbles aside, Breath is a five-star movie Western audiences are fortunate to share.

Also featured at the Boston Festival of Films from Iran: Kiarostami’s posthumous 24 Frames, an experimental film that digitally alters 23 of the filmmaker’s stills to probe the “before-and-after action” of each shot. Visit mfa.org for showtimes.

 

The Teacher

Directed by Jan Hřebejk

Written by Petr Jarchovský

Showing at the Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston, thru November 29

 

Jan Hřebejk and Petr Jarchovský’s new film, The Teacher, tells an age-old story of totalitarian abuse, this time in the setting of a middle school in 1983 Czechoslovakia, then under communist rule. The children start the school year with their new teacher, Mária Drazdechová (award-winning Zuzana Mauréry), and thus begins a horrendous odyssey for both the children and their parents, as Drazdechová invidiously hijacks their lives. From day one, she works through the children to obtain services from their parents—medicines, luxury foods, taxi rides, and even a hoped-for lover. She rewards students whose parents comply by providing tips on the next day’s quiz. The children of refusers receive failing grades and otherwise fall victim to her lies and bullying. She accuses young Karol of distributing food vouchers obtained through his “disgraced mother” who defected to the West, and she claims Filip’s father sexually assaulted her.

Normally such stories of blackmail and political corruption involve adults who find themselves powerless to fight the system, for any protest means loss of a job, imprisonment, or even execution—all under false charges. In The Teacher, the drama is intensified because the victims are children. In her classroom, Drazdechová singles out three non-compliers—Danka, Filip, and Karol—for her sadistic treatment, with Danka eventually attempting suicide and the boys erupting with their suppressed trauma. Throughout her torture and machinations, Drazdechová maintains a sweet, baby-faced manner—all innocence—which adds to her evil.

The movie’s excellent, knitted construction helps develop the characters, especially the three families who decide to take a stand against Drazdechová. During the film’s opening credits, we watch lively children arriving to a communist-era school, and then, at night, we see somber adults filing into the same building. At first it seems the adults have come for night school, but once the action starts, we learn they have come for a meeting on whether or not to sign a petition to remove Drazdechová as a teacher. The school’s “head teacher” runs the meeting, having received a parental complaint. We soon learn, however, that she knows all about Drazdechová and hopes that at last an opportunity has come to be rid of her.

The story moves back and forth from the parents’ tense meeting room to flashbacks of Drazdechová’s connivances with both children and parents. Some of the parents who support Drazdechová—who also heads the school’s communist party organization—benefit from the party as judges, doctors, and bureaucrats. They toe the party line. Most of the working-class parents support Drazdechová because they want their kids to receive good grades in return for small services, such as hairdressing. This movement back and forth from a pseudo jury room to Drazdechová’s real-life persecution of her victims creates depth, drama, and balance in the film. We come to know the characters intimately—including their names—Kucera, Binder, Littman. We feel a strong urge to be in the deliberation room with them, so that we can battle the despicably dishonest people in control and lend a hand to those who insist on the truth. Which side will triumph?

An epilogue concludes the movie—a moral to the story. Communism has ended with the Velvet Revolution. Havel’s picture has replaced Husák’s in a middle-school classroom. What we’re shown in one quick scene is both ludicrous and true: You can’t stop evil—it just finds a new place to park, and the fight to rout it out has to start all over again.

In Between

Directed by Maysaloun Hamoud 
Featured at the 29th Annual Boston Jewish Film Festival
For showtimes visit bjff.org

 

In Between, directed by Maysaloun Hamoud, continues the dialogue about the equality of women. The movie begins with an older woman waxing a young female leg and sharing advice: “Don’t raise your voice, men don’t like women who raise their voices. Remember to always say a kind word, and cook him good food. Don’t forget to put on perfume and to keep your body smooth so that he desires you.”

Music then explodes and we’re at a wild, co-ed, bachelorette party in Tel Aviv with drinking, drugs, and dancing—the central characters’ regular singles backdrop. Beautiful Laila (Mouna Hawa) with long curly locks and a cigarette always in hand, appears bored with this dating scene. Back home the next day, she and her housemate Salma (Sana Jammelieh ) meet an unexpected visitor, Noar (Shaden Kanboura), who’s come to stay with them until she can find her own apartment. Noar explains that her cousin Rafif—Laila and Salma’s absent roommate—said it would be all right. These few opening scenes set the stage for a look at the experience of young Palestinian-Israeli women in today’s urbane Tel Aviv. Laila’s a non-religious feminist lawyer, Salma’s a fringe DJ from a Christian family, and Noar’s a senior at the university and wears full Islamic garb.

Through each of the women’s stories related to their love lives, the film explores male domination, male attitudes toward women, and male abuses when their authority is crossed. Although the film focuses on experiences in today’s diverse Palestinian-Israeli culture, the treatment of Laila, Salma, and Noar is universal. The take-away, as the three women process the denouements of their relationships, is sad, to both them and to us: Men (or most), from lovers to fathers, just don’t get it, they can’t see it, so they can’t change. As if cemented into their behavioral genes, the men in the film (with parallels in other cultures) believe they are right about their entitlement to dominate—to tell women how to dress modestly, to not smoke, to stay at home with the kids—or to abuse them if the women resist. Women in the audience of this important movie freeze at moments when Laila, Salma, or Noar stand up for themselves to their men. We freeze fearing a physical blow, a bashing silencer instead of meaningful conversation. How do men in the audience feel during these tense, cowering moments? Undoubtedly the same. Then why can’t recognition of the problem on the screen translate to real-life consciousness about equality?

We witness one atrocious punishment against Noar by her fiancé Wissam (and compliments to Henry Andrawas for playing such a horrid role). The camera and audio focus intently on Wissam’s zipper going back up after he’s committed his brute crime of authority, and this focus makes the audience think how a man’s “instrument of lovemaking” also serves as a violent weapon. The three women helping each other through their relationship traumas give the audience another universal: women support, comfort, and work for each other and always have, and this community based on gender solidarity is the basis for their strength—their stamina, wisdom, friendship, and bedrock role in all societies. These qualities, so deep in women, contrast to the male strength of body and physical force. Thus the movie honors women but cannot say there will ever be changes in their relationships with men.