LABIRENT (2011)

Thanks to Netflix, Americans have readier access to a more complete range of films from around the world than they ever had before. That means not just art-house or cult/exploitation fare, but middle of the road stuff that represents each country's popular cinema. Labirent, for instance, is a Turkish counterterrorism thriller written and directed by Tolga Örnek, and in many ways it's like counterterror thrillers you might see anywhere. Adorned with 24-style split-screen effects, the film shows the complicated hunt for an Islamist terror cell (with some roots in Germany) carrying out suicide attacks in Turkey. What's different about it is a critical but not quite hostile attitude toward the west, here represented by a British spy (Martin Turner) who collaborates with the Turkish heroes but clearly serves his own country's agenda, even when it compromises the Turkish operation. What comes through is Turkish resentment of the western attitude, probably portrayed here accurately, that doesn't really trust the Turks to keep their own house, much less the region, in order. After all, this is the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamist of sorts in his own right with alleged authoritarian tendencies. Labirent, however, doesn't appear to represent Erdogan's point of view.

Örnek made his name in part with an admiring documentary film about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who abolished the Islamic Caliphate and founded the secular Turkish republic. A picture of Ataturk is conspicuous in this film's anti-terror headquarters, and perhaps even more conspicuous, if not scandalous in the eyes of culturally conservative Turks, is the prominent heroic role of Reyhan (Meltem Cumbul), a female anti-terror operative who serves as the film's second lead after its more tragic male hero Fikret (Timuçin Esen, who speaks fluent English in scenes with Turner). Reyhan is a generic international superwoman, and I say that with admiration. Captured by the terrorists, she's put to the torture, punched repeatedly in the face, subjected to long electrical shocks, and made to watch a friend executed in front of her. Apparently beaten unconscious, she's only playing possum, waiting for just the right moment to untie herself and beat her torturer to death. For a fleeting, almost fatal moment she comes face to face with her antithesis -- a girl terrorist wearing traditional headcovering and wielding a gun, but in the next moment Reyhan's buddies come to the rescue.

One moment Reyhan is down (above), the next she's up and the other guy's down.

Labirent is a little too self-consciously dour and tragic to be that much fun most of the time, and like many a counterterror thriller it grows repetitive portraying terrorists out on walks being stalked by strolling antiterror agents. It has just enough local flavor and attitude to make it not quite as generic as it could be, but fans of the genre from around the world probably could sit through this without finding anything really alien about it. I'm still not sure if that's a virtue or not.

BASKIN (2015)

Apparently the Republic of Turkey is not yet so far gone in Islamic fundamentalism that it won't tolerate a film like Baskin, though writer-director Can Evrenol says he worried sometimes about authorities possibly taking offense at what his crew was shooting. Still, his film received a modest release in its homeland earlier this year after working the festival circuits around the world. It's a derivative movie, almost inevitably, but it's an interesting mix of influences. It's too bad it doesn't entirely follow through on the potential, but it's still a bit of dark fun.

Your high concept here is what if a bunch of tough, ball-busting -- in fact Scorsesean cops have to deal with demonic horrors and torture in a haunted house. Our five police protagonists are so Scorsesean that they do a variation of the "You're a funny guy!" scene from Goodfellas in a diner, taunting a waiter who dared laugh at the dirty jokes they tell each other. Conservative Muslims might well flinch at their humor, including one cop's assertion that 70% of Turkish men have their first sexual encounter with an animal, but my impression is that there are still plenty of secular Turks who would laugh at this claim.

 

Anyway, the cops are called to some podunk place called Inceagac, where the people are strange and the frogs are on the march. Some of their buddies were called earlier to an old Ottoman-era police station where, more or less literally, all hell has broken loose. Some sort of cult of filthy fetishistic degenerates hold rituals there with human victims. They worship some pretentious dwarf called Baba who encourages the quickly-captured cops to open their hearts and embrace the horrors they see. For example, one officer is urged to hump some apparently-willing hag wearing a cattle skull, but Baba can tell the man isn't really feeling it. If you can't open your heart, then you have to be disemboweled or have your throat cut. This culling process leaves a Final Cop who has had visions and flashbacks throughout the picture. Now, as his last buddy is getting his throat slit, he has a vision in which that buddy invites him to fetch the key to survival -- an actual key that fits a keyhole in Baba's head -- out of his slit throat. Cue a final cathartic bloodbath as our surviving hero avenges his buddies, but victory in horror films is often short-lived, and our hero soon has reason to suspect that rejecting Baba's offer of transcendence cost him his only chance at escaping a vicious circle hinted at earlier in the picture.

 

 

What disappointed me about Baskin was the failure to maintain that Scorsesean attitude, to at least talk the talk, through the entire movie. Once confronted with the horrors in the haunted house, the film's cops are pretty much reduced to screaming and whimpering, but for all I know that may have been the point of the exercise, or a point, for Evrenol: the humbling of thuggish men by an immeasurably higher order of thuggery. Where Baskin really excels is its portrait of human degeneration. Whether or not Baba's domain is Hell itself, as is widely assumed, it reaches a repulsively sensual level of abject dehumanization without a lot of makeup or any CGI that's more horrific than any special effect can be. You don't really see a lot of faces here. which suggests a disturbing loss of individuality in this rutting host that craves nothing more than Baba's fleeting touch. Confronted with evil on this scale, the cops look not only petty, as they were in the diner, but puny, which may have been the truth behind their pettiness. That juxtaposition keeps Baskin interesting even when you can't entirely follow the implicit metaphysics of the cops' ordeal. I'm not sure whether there's anything distinctively Turkish, much less Muslim, about it, but I still appreciate seeing such an outbreak of grotesque horror in an unexpected quarter of the wild world of cinema.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (Bir zamanlar anadolu'da, 2011)

The English-language title of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest film is a literal translation from the Turkish, so there's no denying that the director works in the shadow of Sergio Leone -- except that's not quite accurate. The image isn't quite right. Think of Leone as the sun, rather, while Ceylan works in the shadow of Quentin Tarantino. That may not sound right to you, either, given how little violence or action this film has. But Tarantino helps explain the influence of Once Upon a Time in the West in particular among Leone's movies. You could reference a different film in acknowledging Leone's influence, as the Korean film The Good the Bad the Weird did. Why invoke Once Upon a Time..., apart from a belief that the fairy-tale prefix is cool? Tarantino does it in Inglourious Basterds with a title setting the picture "Once Upon a Time in Occupied France." This sets up the scene in which Christoph Waltz's Jew-hunter makes menacing small talk with a French farmer. The small talk makes it Leonean, makes it Once Upon a Time. More specifically, the time killing does. What set Once Upon a Time in the West apart from Leone's previous westerns, and reportedly turned Clint Eastwood off of appearing in it, was the lavishly protracted credits sequence in which Jack Elam, Al Mulock and Woody Strode occupy a train station and wait for Charles Bronson arrive. They're not much for small talk but Leone is fascinated by the ways they kill time, from Elam trapping a fly in the barrel of his gun to Strode accumulating water from a leaky ceiling in the brim of his hat until he can take a drink. Tarantino is Leone plus George V. Higgins (an author about whom I've written before and will have cause to cite again later this year). His characters kill the time with conversation, sometimes brilliantly but sometimes excessively (Death-Proof). Once Upon a Time in Anatolia applies the Leone/Tarantino method to a police procedural.

 

Following a prologue that seems to set up some action, only to cut away, the film proper follows a group of police investigators in three cars through the Anatolian countryside over the course of a night and morning, with two of the men we met in the prologue in custody. The cops, including a sensitive doctor who emerges as our POV character, want the suspects to show them where they buried a man they presumably murdered. The perps' memories aren't very good. One was drunk at the time and the other's kind of simple. They stop and start over again several times, the tougher cops getting increasingly frustrated. There's a lot of time for small talk, discussions of the virtues of buffalo yogurt, seeming tall tales of past cases. They stop in a village where courtesy requires them to settle down for a feast at the mayor's house, until the power goes out. They finally find the body, hogtied, the next morning. The cops' moods go across the board. Some of them are appalled over the killers' apparent barbarity -- turns out they hogtied the guy because that was the only way to fit him into the trunk of a car, and fitting him into one of the cop vehicles becomes a blackly comic problem later. But the prosecutor accompanying the cops cracks himself up by noting that the mustachioed victim resembles Clark Gable, only to be told by one of the cops that he looks a little like Gable himself. The onetime "King" apparently looms larger among Turks today than he does among his own people -- or else that's the Tarantino influence coming through again.

 

You get the feeling that the doctor doesn't really know how to deal with the whole experience, which proves a sort of domestic tragedy, the man having died because he started a fight after hearing that one of the eventual killers was his son's real father. Before he learns this he tends to be more kindly toward Kenan, the lead suspect, while the  more hardened cops warn him that Kenan is out to manipulate him. Yet we see Kenan blubber like a baby when the mayor's daughter offers him some honey, and overall he looks more like a sad-sack than a badass -- especially when he appears (unintentionally?) haloed by the headlights of the car behind him while sitting among his prosecutors. Through the doctor's eyes we see Kenan take a rock to the face from a kid in an angry crowd outside the police station -- the kid is apparently Kenan's natural child. While the other investigators find ways to objectify the victim -- the Clark Gable jokes, for instance -- that do little to restore the humanity Kenan had taken from him, the doctor opts at the end of the picture for an act of reticence -- he suppresses autopsy evidence indicating that Kenan had buried his victim alive -- motivated by compassion for perpetrator and survivors alike. Revealing that extra sordid detail would only cause more pain for everyone. It's probably also telling that while the victim is dug up and displayed in broad daylight, in full view of the camera, Ceylan always keeps his camera above the grisly work of the autopsy the doctor supervises. The Tarantino influence is more a matter of form than a matter of content.

 

Ceylan has established his own identity as an international arthouse mainstay over the past decade, and he has enough of a distinct directorial personality that the Tarantino influence might go unnoticed. Pictorially Ceylan is his own man. While taking full advantage of a wide screen, his effects are often more like those of a miniaturist in his attention to fine detail -- though I may see that only because I watched the film (in HD) on a tablet rather than a full-sized monitor. As was the case in his previous picture (and the only other one I've seen), Three Monkeys, his frames sometimes seem too carefully composed, too self-consciously painterly. His aesthetic sense remains underdisciplined, so that the brilliant compositions threaten to distract attention from story or theme. There's almost a show-off quality in the cinematography of Gökhan Tiryaki: look what I can do with lighting at night! The balance of style and substance remains uncertain in Ceylan's work, but any excess only enhances its attraction as a visual spectacle. His actors, however, are unimpeachable; it's hard to judge in a foreign language, but nothing rang false here. The writing, shared with his wife and another scripter, grounds the flights of style so that substance arguably triumphs in the end. That accomplishment may mark Ceylan as a director who shares influences with Tarantino rather than being influenced directly by the American. While Tarantino likes to wear his influences on his sleeve, Ceylan may yet transcend them and become an influence in his own right.

A STEP INTO THE DARKNESS (Buyuk Oyun, 2009)

The blurb on the box cover claims that Atil Inac's film "Plays like Hurt Locker from the opposite vantage point." However attractive that comment may have seemed to Vanguard Cinema, the distributor of the DVD, it misrepresents the film, which portrays a woman caught between the two fires of American occupation and jihadist terror. In war, contrary to what some may believe, there can be more than two sides.

Filmed on location in the Turkmen and Kurdish regions of Iraq and in Turkey, Buyuk Oyun is the story of Cennet (the name roughly rhymes with "Jeanette"), a young Turkmen woman who takes a lucky trip to an outhouse just as an American unit rolls into her village and shoots up her family. This is as much as we see of the Americans in the film, and they're shown as blunderers rather than villains. Nevertheless, Cennet bears a grudge. Her first priority, however, is to go to Kirkuk, where her one remaining brother works at a barter mart.

After the horrors Cennet (Suzan Genc) has seen, moving on isn't as easy as it looks.

In Kirkuk, Cennet learns that her brother was injured in a terrorist bombing and airlifted to Turkey for specialized medical care. Without a passport, she resolves to cross the border to find her brother. She entrusts herself to a group of smugglers ("bandits" from a more skeptical perspective) and gets raped for her trouble. Despairing and dishonored, she tries to kill herself by jumping off a cliff into a river, but she's fished out by good samaritans who finally get her into Turkey. She ends up in the tender care of a jihadist cell led by a goggle-eyed fanatic. He promises to inquire about her brother, who had been transferred to an Istanbul hospital, but blatantly lies to her, telling her without checking that the brother is dead. He quite consciously wants to mold her into a suicide bomber, cynically describing her and another woman as "lambs" who'll make quite a show by blowing themselves up simultaneously. This sets up the sort of suspense we've seen before. Will Cennet go through with the bombing? Will her suicide vest function or not? Will she manage to encounter her brother and learn the truth before she throws her life away? Without spoiling too much, I'll say I was favorably surprised by the lack of resolution at the end of the picture.

If sacrificing one's life is such a great thing, how come guys like this never do it themselves?

Atil Inac and co-writer Avni Ozgurel clearly oppose both the Americans and the jihadists. Their sympathies are with the simple people caught in the middle, whose lives are likely to be made no better no matter which side wins. While the jihadist leader is clearly the main villain of the piece (and his final scene raises questions about possible ties to the U.S.), Buyuk Oyun uses Cennet's odyssey to put a human face on a suicide terrorist. She is no Islamist. She isn't out to conquer the world in the name of a Caliphate. She doesn't hate anybody's freedom. But she's angry and vengeful and, most importantly, believing her brother dead, she has no family and thus, to her mind, nothing to live for. That detail may illustrate a significant cultural difference between Iraqis and Americans. We might expect an American so victimized and isolated to grit her teeth, start over and find her own place in the world. Cennet doesn't seem to believe that she has her own place as an individual; without her family, and without honor after the rape, she feels that her life means nothing and may as well be given up in some meaningful way. She thinks differently by the end, but her experiences have alienated her to the point where she seems to be more isolated, more alone than she really is.

Suzan Genc made her movie debut playing Cennet and makes a sympathetic impression. As a director, Inac has a strong eye for the landscapes of northern Iraq, but some montages seem padded to accommodate Sabri Tulug Tirpan's score. He opts for some narrative telescoping through montage that throws away some strong opportunities for drama, especially when we get to Cennet's indoctrination into jihadism. Inac may simply have been careful to avoid having Cennet espouse opinions that might lose her audience sympathy. As for the audience, Buyuk Oyun did the festival circuit before opening in Turkey earlier this year, and apparently hasn't played theatrically in the United States. One scene in which Cennet goes topless to apply dye to her breasts, out of fear that her explosion might expose naughty fragments to unwanted eyes, makes me suspect that Inac's primary audience is the global art-house crowd rather than the Turkish public. At the very least I'd bet that that scene isn't playing in Turkish or Iraqi theaters.

A Step Into the Darkness isn't the first suicide-bomber movie from a Muslim filmmaker and isn't necessarily the best one. But the setting and the story make me want to recommend this film as something like a moral imperative to those who still wonder why some folks in the Middle East have bad intentions toward Westerners. I consider myself fortunate that the Albany Public Library acquired the film. More libraries should do the same.

This English-subtitled trailer was uploaded to YouTube by tftyapim.

BLISS (Mutluluk, 2007)

Here's a romantic drama from Turkey about rape and honor killing. Abdullah Oguz's film opens with shepherds discovering an unconscious girl on a beach. They wrap her in a rug and bring her to town, where it soon emerges, or it's assumed, that Meryem has been raped. That's a scandal that could hurt the prestige of the clan presided over by the Agha and local factory owner, Ali Riza. He summons Meryem's father and orders him to do the right thing for the extended family, which is to put Meryem to death to expunge the collective shame. But you can tell right off that Dad's a softy who won't have the heart to do it. Meryem's stepmom is probably a different story. She tosses Meryem a rope and suggests that the girl hang herself; God might be more forgiving that way. Meryem almost does it, but finally refuses, if only to spite the wicked stepmom. Fortunately for the Agha, there's a likely man for the job arriving in town: his own son Cemal, back from military service as a commando battling "terrorists," -- Kurds, presumably. Ali Riza tells his boy to take Meryem to Istanbul to do the deed away from local prying eyes. When Cemal balks briefly, the Agha reminds him that, as his dad, he's his commanding officer now. So it's off to the big city for a gravely mismatched couple.

When Meryem (Ozgu Namal) can't bump herself off, Cemal (Murat Han) is ordered to take her for a ride, but he sometimes isn't sure whom to bump off.

It'd be a short movie if Cemal could do the deed. When he can't goad her to jump to her death, he breaks down before he can pull the trigger on her. He clearly has issues of his own, at least with his dad (who we'll see has driven at least one other son away from him) if not with his wartime experiences. In any event, neither he nor Meryem can go back now, so they begin a picturesque picaresque adventure that takes them to a fishery and its adjoining shack, then to work as mate and cook on a college professor's sailboat. Cemal doesn't want Irfan the professor (Talat Bulut) to know their real identities and relationship, and he grows jealous as Irfan, who we see served with divorce papers in one scene, gives Meryem presents and tries to teach the backward girl about the wider world. Meanwhile, Ali Riza assumes the worst -- that Meryem hasn't been killed -- when Cemal doesn't come home, so he hits the trail to track them both down. Will Cemal's jealousy make the Agha's effort redundant?

Mutluluk is based on a novel, but cinematically it reminded me of some semi-waterborne tough-love stories like Sunrise and L'Atalante. It's distinguished by lovely land and seascape cinematography by Mirsad Herovic, who crafts pastoral images of almost archaic quality. The story may be a tough sell as a romance, in America at least, because of Cemal's occasional thuggishness. He's a man who, when provoked, will call Meryem a "whore" and sometimes slap her, but he's our hero, and as Irfan sees it, Cemal is only lashing out because he won't admit that he's in love with Meryem. Irfan is almost too good to be true in his disinterested benevolence, despite the director's attempt to incite suspicion with the divorce subplot. Nearly strangled by Cemal at one point, he drinks and has a heart-to-heart with him shortly afterward. I suppose it's part of the romantic tradition to have a benevolent eccentric around to steer the leads into each other's arms.

It's not until more than halfway through the film that we realize that there's a mystery to be solved. Meryem has constantly refused to name whoever raped her, and she sometimes insists that nothing actually happened. She may be keeping silent on purpose, but it seems more likely that she'd repressed the memory. In any event, the identity of the culprit seems irrelevant to the story for some time, since the rape dooms Meryem no matter whodunit. On the boat, however, Irfan throws her some rope, intending to teach her to tie a special knot, but it sparks a flashback to her near-hanging, and that leads to the first of several fragmentary scenes from her rape. Once we notice that the rapist's identity is being withheld, we know a big revelation is in store that is actually pretty predictable. And once that anticipation sinks in, you notice how a certain unconscious cultural prejudice may have kept you from anticipating it earlier, if you're a western viewer. Watching a film by and about a Muslim country, you may assume that honor killing is just what's done, especially in a backwater like Meryem's town. Scandalized by the concept, the issue of who raped Meryem may become irrelevant for you until Oguz gradually brings it back to the forefront. There may be a lesson in this film. When we see deplorable things in the Muslim world, we're tempted to blame them on Islam or Islamic culture in a way that makes the whole culture collectively guilty, but Bliss refutes that assumption by showing how religion or tradition can be exploited for pure self-interest. The best thing about the lesson is that Oguz doesn't make a lesson of it. It isn't a point that anyone has to make explicitly, but it's one that makes this sometimes-melodramatic story worthwhile.

Here's a trailer with English subtitles uploaded by the American DVD distributor, firstrunfeaturesnyc:

THREE MONKEYS (2008)

This is my belated first stop in Turkey since I started my tour of the wild world of cinema last year. It was going to be this film or Tarkan Versus the Vikings -- and I will get to that one eventually. That's probably more along the lines of what people think of when they think of Turkish cinema, along with buccaneering copyright infringement and cargo-cult like recreations of western genre tropes. But serious Turkish cinema has occasionally demanded recognition, and it's only reasonable that Turkey should have some cinematic counterpart of Orhan Pamuk, the nation's Nobel-winning novelist (whose Snow would make quite a cool movie -- no pun intended). Right now the leading claimant for that position is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for this picture, the sixth of his career and the third to make a strong international impression following Distant (2002) and Climates (2006).

The box copy for Zeitgeist Video's DVD pitches Three Monkeys as a kind of film noir, and a bare description of the plot won't exactly prove them wrong. The title refers to the iconic trio of "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil," and while Ceylan and his co-writer/spouse Ebru Ceylan don't assign specific dysfunctions to the members of the Ozturk family, this unhappy trio appears to have all the bases covered. Ezup, the father, is a chauffeur and stooge for Servet, a struggling politician who dozes at the wheel one night and runs someone over, then runs from the scene. Servet convinces Ezup to take the rap for him, promising that he'll serve six months at most while his family will be well compensated. It ends up being a year, and during that time Servet has an affair with Hacer, Ezup's wife. Meanwhile, young Ismail's life spirals out of control as he falls in with a gang and gets his ass kicked offscreen in a bloody rumble. An accident allows Ismail to discover his mom's dalliance. He smacks her around a bit but lacks the courage to tell his dad, who has his suspicions anyway. Once Ezup's out of jail Servet calls a quick halt to the affair, but Hacer has fallen hard for him, obsessively so, in spite of his threat to kill her if she keeps it up. But it's Servet who ends up dead, leaving us with a little murder mystery for the final act of the film.

Ismail (Rifat Singar) confronts his mother Hacer (Hatice Aslan) in their realistically cramped yet impeccably art-directed apartment.

On this evidence, Ceylan is a rigorous director whose work demands close attention. His images are composed rather than stylized, and painstakingly so in order to to sustain an illusion of social realism and everyday activity. Sometimes he goes pictorially overboard with portentous skyscapes, but that's still consistent with his use of landscape and atmosphere to evoke mood. Our surroundings often take on a more dramatic aspect in times of anxiety or other profound emotions, and for the most part Ceylan's patient long-take compositions achieve that subjective effect without going overboard.

Samples of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's compositions, with cinematography by Gokan Tiryaki.

The long takes also direct our attention to the emotional activity in his actor's faces. He sets the rule in the first scene of the film: a long shot of Servet driving through the night and struggling to stay awake. Ercan Kesel nails the challenge of working with his eyes alone. Elsewhere, you can always see the wheels turning in characters' minds. This is important because the Ceylans are concerned with their struggles to cope with undesirable revelations. None of the characters want to deal with the moral implications of their actions or inaction. All the Ozturks are complicit in a cover-up, after all, and it just comes naturally for them to cover things up from one another. Sometimes they simply don't want to accept what's happening. At one point Hacer seems ready to commit suicide. Eyup sees her crouch on a rooftop ledge, flees from the scene a short distance and stands there, clearly going through some moral agony but apparently incapable for some time of even asking her not to jump. This is one of several scenes in which Yavuz Bingol shines, and all the principals have moments of that kind. Rifat Singar as Ismail has a particularly eerie moment when we can see the transition from real time to dream time as a bead of sweat starts to run up the kid's forehead.

And there's a ghost.

Despite reassuring visits to the cemetery the dead don't seem to stay buried in Three Monkeys.

Ismail had a younger brother once who puts in occasional reappearances, popping in as if from a J-Horror film. Intriguingly, the Ceylans never tell us how this boy died, though we can safely assume that he drowned. It may have had something to do with a father-sons day out, because Ismail and Eyup both see the ghost, but Hacer doesn't. In any event, the ghost is just one of the details that hint at the dark intimate history of the Ozturk family, and it's enough for us to understand that there are unspoken issues (in keeping with the three-monkeys theme) without having them all spelled out.

I was impressed by Three Monkeys, and since I've been given the impression that it's not as good as Distant and Climates I'm now looking forward to seeing those. The Albany Public Library has Climates as well as this title, so you can expect a review of that earlier effort sometime in the New Year. For now, take a look at the Three Monkeys trailer, uploaded to YouTube by beno852: