"Wild Pear Tree"
"The Egg"
◎ Zhang Yue
I have been to Turkey to see the "Turkish Film Week" launched by the Shanghai Art Film Alliance, and the intimacy of revisiting it for a reason, because the works of Nuri Bige Ceylon and Semich Kaplanoglu, two masters with different styles, are close to poetic emotions, ordinary people's lives and people's real plight, not exaggerated, not levitating, and somewhat magical.
From the movie, we found that Turkish youth want to pursue a distant life, just like Chinese youth favor the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou, only the capital Ankara, the cosmopolitan metropolis of Istanbul, and the slightly jianghu port city of Izmir can choose from. How different can the minds of young people be?
Nuri Bige Ceylon: Everything is understood and everything is inclusive
Ceylon's name is pronounced "Jelan" or "Jaylan" in Turkey, and international people accustomed to English tend to call him "Ceylon", but I don't know if he deliberately named the male protagonist who is suspected of having a self-metaphor "Sinan" in the recent "Wild Pear Tree". This story is more directly directed than Ceylon's previous works to the knowledge of young and middle-aged people he was familiar with and interested in. His "Hibernation" is a real satire on intellectuals, and "Wild Pear Tree" is more like a spirit that has nowhere to settle in the pursuit of literary and artistic ideals.
Sinan had a wish, a confusion, a desire to publish his first collection of essays and stories, a confusion that his father, who was addicted to gambling horses, had left his family destitute, could he sell his father's beloved hound for money to publish the book? From the beginning of the film, it is implied that he is calculating. The process of Sinan making a living while dreaming is the process of disillusionment of a young man who is not satisfied with the status quo according to the director's thinking: the government is disillusioned with hypocrisy, love is disillusioned with money, friendship is disillusioned with love and hatred, education is disillusioned with the examination distribution system, literary predecessors are disillusioned with selfishness and self-preservation, capital is disillusioned with pride and ignorance, Sinan watches the family barely maintain in betrayal and mutual doubt, two imams who usually lead the villagers to pray, with a worldly attitude of lazy thinking, killed his last struggle, he sold his dog, he published a book, Sold conscience for private dreams. After the book was published, there was greater disillusionment, the question of life and meaning was in front of him, and his father, whom he despised the most, became the only reader and confidant in his world.
If Troy's original site canakkale, his hometown town, and the rural ancestors seem to correspond to The superego, self, and self of Sinan, and the father's original self has always been trapped in the small town life, he is the "hopeless romanticist" who makes the previous writer irritable and even afraid (his stubborn practice of transforming the countryside, quite like the whimsical father at the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude"), whether it is raising dogs, shepherding sheep or gambling horses, all stem from his intimate relationship with the natural world, he is a kind and lovely, poetic loser. Even forgave the son's injury, and the father and son reconciled at the level of survival value that was deeply related by blood.
The defeat of The stunned Qing Xinan has a self-deprecating component of the director, and his earth-shattering blade attitude is the character trait of the writer to become a talent, but the forensic doctor in "Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor" wraps his blade with a more restrained and rational character. The story has Chekhovian satire and revelation of the characters deeply inside, Tolstoy's panoramic depiction of group portraits and gentle consolation, and even Dostoevsky's ethical desperate choices, and Ceylon will further develop his style drawn from Russian classic literature in Hibernation in the future.
There was a murder in Asia Minor, the police, prosecutors, forensic doctors and a dozen other people with the suspect overnight to find the burial site, Ceylon let us see not the murder itself, but the human psychological group portrait of the mortal world, such as the old policeman who became a workaholic because he could not stand the illness of his child, the mayor of the town who had a good life and the village electricity was hung up, and the most interested audience was the story of the inexplicable death of the "friend and beautiful wife" told by the narcissistic prosecutor, which surfaced step by step with the truth. The prosecutor's temperament and inner torment are also peeled off in the middle of the small talk between self-description and others. Although Ceylon let the country girl shine a beautiful picture of the people sitting in the darkness with the beauty of a holy woman, triggering moments of epiphany, Ceylon was still concerned with how to preserve conscience in a compromised way of survival in the secular world, an attitude that was ambiguous and helpless, and this was the difference between him and the occasional Abbas, who, with a categorical attitude of not believing in the "afterlife", was concerned with how to pursue love, divinity and the positive meaning of life in the secular world. Doctors interrupting others about the private lives of prosecutors is Ceylon's tolerant attitude towards mortals.
SEMICH KAPLANOGLU: I don't understand it, but I'm shocked
Semich Kaplanoglu's entry point is more intimate than Ceylon's, and his use of sound and image rather than novel-like lines to create an intuitive infection on the audience, which will cause some people to "I don't understand much, but I am deeply shocked" psychological impact, and it is easy to remind people of the silent Abbas. Semich's "Egg", "Milk", and "Honey" trilogy show the story of the same person, the poet "Joseph", in three life stages of middle age, youth and childhood according to flashback time, and he places the three stages together in the same historical time, that is, the present.
"Egg" does not have many lines, we can intuitively feel the inner world of Joseph who returned from Istanbul to his hometown in the countryside of Izmir Province, his tired spirit, habitual escape, attachment to his mother, fragility to fear, the illusion of not separating dreams from reality, and the intimacy with the land of trees, which makes us confused and curious, but the director just throws bricks and leads us into more and more wonderful "Milk" and "Honey", tracing back to the answer to why a person is so, Go back and understand and accept the warm ending that the director designed for this man. We don't understand why Joseph suddenly faints when he sees a man pulling a rope back and forth, Honey talks about the relationship between his father's death and this action, and it also talks about Joseph's epilepsy inherited from his father, a disease that prevents him from performing military service in Milk and unable to join the strong youth, an embarrassing situation that aggravates his jealousy of others and his withdrawal from love.
"Milk" has fewer lines, and the character activities of different scenes produce a montage-like collage effect in the audience's mind, and the director stimulates us to passively feel at the same time, subjectively trying to find a polysemy interpretation from the information collage. Joseph watched other young people engage in rock and roll, but he himself pestered the old poet to pursue the dream of poetry, which was out of place for him. Ceylon would spend a lot of tit-for-tat lines to show the disillusionment of the youth caused by the literary predecessors, and Semich only did it with the two-minute scene where Joseph sent the old drunkard poet back to his lonely home. His workers' poetry friends may be higher than his poetry, which is revealed through the hesitation of the people and scenes in Joseph's sight and when he helps to submit. In order to show the confusion and sadness of Joseph finally facing reality to work, the director drags the audience into the huge light of the helmet searchlight in the darkness, and we are in sync with Joseph's feelings.
"Honey" is about the initial innocence of people in the mountains, so it is most popular with the audience, and it is also the great revelation of the childhood experience to the adult Joseph, who reveres the beekeeper tough guy father who has an accident at the beginning of the film, and the audience has been waiting for another shoe to fall. As a child, Joseph's Oedipal instinct of looking at his mother's ankles and smiling, his jealousy of other people's children whose father cared for him were revealed early, and the poetry and dreams that life in the forest gave him. Everything is natural, even the child's sleep on the Sultan-style sofa is natural, we did not imagine sadness after watching it, but also because of the beauty of nature...
In the image space of the two Turkish masters, the conscious and subconscious minds are interrelated and do not distinguish between priority and subordination, which interweaves personal experience with universal comfort, character reality and thinking activities, Turkish reality and image dreaming.