Superb cinematic technique lightens this gruelling tale of hostile mountain life
Times and Winds (15)
dir: Reha Erdem
Austerity is one of the qualities a viewer expects of any film set in a deprived Turkish mountain village where people are outnumbered by goats, life revolves around the imam's calls to prayer and a father expresses love for his son by beating him for five minutes rather than the customary ten. In this respect, and this respect alone, Times and Winds disappoints. It does boast an impressive supporting cast of livestock, some of which betray no sign of nerves or modesty when called upon to play candid sex scenes while sniggering children look on. (The goat that makes its screen debut and its swansong in the same sacrifice scene drew the short straw by comparison. What was its agent thinking?) But this supremely confident picture from the Istanbul-born writer-director Reha Erdem breaks many of the usual art-house rules. It is poetic but also visually aggressive, and it runs on a punchy rhythm from the get-go.
Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali), a moon-faced boy, has a crush on his pretty teacher. When he removes a thorn from her foot during a field trip or breezes home after bringing her a loaf of bread the size of a paving slab, he seems to float. You can see not only how he craves affection, but why. His mother is pregnant, and Yakup is praying for a brother - he thinks if it's a girl the child will replace him in her heart.
That's if it survives. When he asks his mother whether she "lost" her earlier baby because of his father, she tells him to stay out of grown-ups' business. The stoicism with which she has accepted her husband's brutality towards her is almost as shocking as the cruelty itself.
Her blitheness is reproduced throughout the community: a boy unselfconsciously shows the welts criss-crossing his back, and two classmates compare injuries sustained at home. Times and Winds depicts violence being nodded through by family members and partly ratified by patriarchal Islam. Men who are goaded and humiliated by their own fathers are shown passing on that hurt in turn to their uncomprehending sons.
Yakup's chum Ömer (Özkan Özen) represents the natural product of a climate of retribution. Ömer's face is still, but the feverish Arvo Pärt soundtrack reflects the desires cooking beneath this cool exterior. Ömer loathes his father (Bülent Emin Yarar), an imam who favours his precocious kid brother over him. So, both Ömer and Yakup have sibling issues, as does Yildiz (Elit Iscan), a twinkly-eyed schoolgirl with a pink backpack, who has to halt her studies to placate her wailing baby brother.
But Ömer has gone from merely wishing his father would die to helping the process along. The old man has bad lungs, so the boy pushes open the bedroom window on a cold night, hoping the draught will finish him off. When this doesn't work, his murderous plans escalate: he tampers with his father's medicine and ponders death by scorpion sting. These scenes are played arrow-straight, but they give off a comic chill. Yakup does his best to keep Ömer's spirits up. "Maybe he'll fall from the minaret," he offers cheerfully.
A film that could have been a gruelling experience is lent a weightless aspect by Erdem's transformative use of cinematic grammar. It feels like sacrilege when he deploys a Steadicam to follow Yildiz through the slanted stone streets of her village; this contraption enables eerily smooth camera movement (think of the psychic child navigating hotel corridors in The Shining, or the nightclub sequence in Goodfellas) and makes us feel we are levitating. The Steadicam's slickness seems to jar with the humble, impoverished setting, but Erdem uses it as an expressionistic tool, just like the Pärt score, to unlock the children's woozy emotional states.
With this technique, the director reaches a deliberate point of overkill where the gliding camera has made us seasick and we've been driven half-demented by the churning music. But, taken in tandem with the film's desolate widescreen imagery - a typical frame in the film shows a featureless horizon interrupted by the vertical fissure of a lone tree, a minaret or a figure in the distance - these heady touches convey simultaneously the isolation of the rural religious life and the boiling, bubbling need that Ömer, Yakup and Yildiz have to be spared its injustices.
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