Bliss, aka Mutluluk: Grade A

A

Bliss, aka Mutluluk (2007)
Özgü Namal, Talat Bulut, Murat Han; Director Abdullah Oguz. (Turkish, subtitled).

A young girl (Namal) is raped in a small village in Turkey and then is rejected by her family and village for that “crime.” She won’t say who did it. Her uncle orders her killed to restore the family honor and assigns his son (Han) to the task, but he can’t go through with it and runs away with the girl to the sea. Thugs are sent in pursuit. The mood between the son and the girl is tense, but gradually they develop a working relationship because they recognize that neither can ever go back to the village. They meet a rich, well-educated professor (Bulut) from Istanbul who takes them aboard his gorgeous wooden sailboat and they are exposed to secular life and values for the first time. They are shocked, horrified and fascinated at the same time. In the end justice is done.

It’s a beautiful film to look at, the acting outstanding, the characters engaging, but the sharply drawn theme was the highlight for me. The rigid village traditions seem ridiculous, but most people in the world live in such traditional societies and it makes you wonder why. The answer must be that without those rigid rules (including religious rules, although that aspect is not raised in this film), people would not know how to behave at all. How could you know what was right and what was wrong? Life would be chaos. The rules of traditional society tell you what a person should be, just as military training does for our soldiers and religious training does for most people. Although the result is only a person shaped for a narrowly defined world, the alternative would be a person without a compass. So you realize how necessary traditional values are.

But then you wonder, how do we get by in secular society? The answer this film offers is education. If you are educated, you can discern up from down, right from wrong. Is that correct? I’m not sure it is a complete answer. The movie also says it helps if you are rich so you don’t have to deal with the grubbiness of life. The character of the professor is a too-easy answer, not entirely convincing, but it is one answer. The final message of the movie in any case is that secularism is better than traditionalism.

The tension between traditional and secular society is at the core of modern Turkey, underlying its politics, sociology, and its struggle to join the EU. For Turks, this would be a powerful film that goes right to the heart.

The Edge of Heaven: Grade A

A
The Edge of Heaven (2008)
Nurgül Yesilçay, Tuncel Kurtiz, Hanna Schygulla, Nursel Köse; Writer-director Fatih Akin. (German and Turkish; subtitled).

Turkish-born German director Akin tells of three families whose lives intersect in random ways, per the now formulaic Crash template. Much of the action and dialog takes place in Istanbul and in northeastern (Kurdish) Turkey. An old Turkish man (Kurtiz) in Germany invites a Turkish prostitute (Yesilcay) to quit the business and move in with him. His son is a German professor of Turkish studies, who goes to Turkey to search for the woman’s adult daughter. Meanwhile, the daughter (Kose), a Kurdish activist hunted by police, goes to Bremen to search for her mother. Those two characters cross paths but never meet, though we badly want them to. The daughter befriends a female college student in Bremen and they become lovers. When tragedy befalls them, the student’s mother (Schygulla) travels to Turkey. There her path crosses that of the now-deported old Turk who had befriended the prostitute, but they never meet. The story just ends when the time is up. There is no resolution and it is frustrating, until you realize that in real life, no bell rings to mark “resolution.” We each live in a bubble, trying to make sense of our own lives. As the viewer we have an omniscient, God’s – eye view of how these six lives interact over time, culture, and geography, yet we are forced to settle for the tunnel vision of a mere mortal. It is a contradiction.

The cinematographer prefers high contrast lighting with bright, contrasting colors, especially red and white. It’s a sharp look, very pleasing even in scenes of urban squalor. Acting is marvelous, especially by Köse, who dominates the screen. Apparently she is a big star in Turkey but unknown (until now) outside the country. Schygulla has a smaller role but she still has the magic of her youth. Just asking for a cup of coffee, she rivets your attention. The directing does not draw attention to itself but the writing does. For supposedly ordinary people living ordinary lives, too many low probability events occur and when those tales are not concluded, we wonder what the point was. So in the end, the movie is not quite satisfying, but the beautiful pictures, fine acting, and fascinating languages and cultures more than make up for any deficit in story.