Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Fri May 11, 2007 2:10 pm 
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A lovely little package

A sanitized and aestheticized image of village life is the limit of what Reha Erdem's Times and Winds (Turkish title Beş Vakit) shows us, but not without emotional conflicts--jealousies, resentments, secrets, with a focus on twelve- to thirteen-year-olds. They wear blue smocks, like French schoolchildren. The tranquility is well captured, to the point that the film may seem to lack a pulse. There's life under the surface but mostly we don't get to see it. What we do see is a little panorama of physical and mental abuse. One boy, Omer (Ozkan Ozen), whose father is the local imam (Bulent Emin Yarar), is beaten by him and plots his death. Yakup (Alibey Kayali), his best mate, resents his own father too, for always preferring his younger brother. Two adult brothers are abused in turn by their father for being bad farmers. In fact all the parents in Times and Winds are mean to their children. A horse is also beaten.

Sex and love are not missing from the picture. Yakup is madly in love with his young schoolmistress, and another female character is an older girl named Yildiz (Elit Iscan), whose life is touched on from time to time. Yildiz cares for her baby brother, hears her parents making love; is aware of and troubled by sex. Late in the film, she has a mishap, which may make us think there will be more. There is an illness. And a birth.

And that is the message: people are born, they go to school, they grow up, they have trouble and endure hardship, have squabbles, have kids, grow old, and die. Not a simple message, but not one you're likely to be surprised by. The restrained, episodic structure further distances the viewer from deep emotional involvement, while perhaps awakening a vague sense of nostalgia or a pleasure in the exoticism and remoteness of the world depicted.

The skillful widescreen cinematography by Florent Herry and the music of Aarvo Pärt are almost too potent a combination. The film has been called hypnotic and stunning. The images of landscapes and skies are overwhelming, the sense of the rhythms of time and life are meditative. The Turkish title, Beş Vakit, means "five times," and refers to the five times of the day in which devout Muslims are expected to pray: fajr (dawn), dhuhr (noon), 'asr (afternoon), maghrib (sunset), and 'isha (evening).

Pärt's strong, recurrent orchestral music makes you feel like you're in a concert hall. But the sweet exoticism and prettiness don't compensate for the failure to take any aspect of the action, the girl's awareness of sex, the boy's crush on his teacher, the brothers' rivalry, the older men's squabbles, mean anything, cause any lasting conflict, create any situation in need of being resolved. Similarly there's a failure to look forward or backward. A portrait of the texture of village life (an old woman gets a shot, a cow starts calving) isn't a portrait of any villager's life. Erdem sets his simple, lovely rhythms going masterfully. But he also seems to suffer from an unwillingness to look really deeper. (The music imposes a greater sameness on the action than it would otherwise have.) But this is the dissenter's view. Times and Winds played at Tribeca and now at the SFIFF. And there is a festival audience that adores such things.

Shown as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2007.

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