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Still dazed and in misery due to, as EU president of parliament Martin Schulz put it, an entire continent taken hostage by an inner Tory party dispute, I embraced the chance at escapism via the international Munich Film Festival. Via, you know, movies dealing with such uplifiting topics as military dictatorship, paranoia, police violence, and so forth.
Not, but really, the two movies I saw yesterday were certainly compelling.
Orestes: directed by Rodrigo Siqueira: a Brazilian movie that is fiendishly difficult to categorize. The quick summary in the film festival catalogue made it sound like a modern day adaption of the Greek myth of the title, but then the lady introducing the movie called it a documentary. So which was it, I wondered, as the movie started, and as it turned out, it was both. How so?
Rodrigo Siqueira uses as a modern day adaption of the story of Orestes, specifically, the trial that concludes the Oresteia by Aischylos, as a framing device to interview and act out psychodrama/therapy with real victims of violence - violence by the state in the past (a lot of the movie deals with the still unacknowledged murders and torture during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, and n the present (police shooting down people despite having the option not to, otoh school children getting shot by criminal). The modern Orestes does never appear in the movie; he and the trial which is conducted by a real state and a real defense attorney are the only parts that are fictional. (So the director said in the Q & A later.)
Quite how the story of Orestes got adapted tells you immediately something about the focus: modern present day Orestes no longer kiled his mother to avenge his father, he killed his father to avenge his mother. (The gender reversal, of course, immediately also eliminates one of the biggest things to stick in the throat if you're reading or watching The Kindly Ones, i.e. the concluding drama of the Oresteia, to wit, Athena's argument that fathers should count more than mothers in terms of child loyalty.) The context in which his father killed his mother is specifically political and tied to recent Brazilian history: he was a goverment spy, she was an activist/militant in the group he infiltrated. The arguments in the trial are very political, too: for example, the state attorney says there's no way Orestes killling his father was spontanous because Orestes had to dwell on this for 37 years while the state refused to do anything but grant amnesty to all murderers and torturers of the military dictatorship.
But like I said, this is only the framing narration, or if you like the skeleton, and the meant of the movie are the true stories.The one with the most obvious parallel to the adapted myth is that of Nasaindy, whose mother, Soledad, was killed (pregnant) by a government spy in her movement she had an affair with. Because the guy in question already knew her when they were trained in Cuba, when Soledad was with Nasaindy's father, another fellow militant who died, and because no photos of the father exist (at least no complete ones, Nasaindy has one where you can see male hands holding her which she thinks were his), she did/does wonder the inevitable: whether her mother's murderer (currently alive and well, there's a YouTube clip played with him in his blithe "ah well, saved democracy from the domino effect, didn't I?" smugness that's chilling) wasn't also her father.
Then there's Eliana, whose son, a drug addict, was gunned down, despite not having carried a weapon. Eliana is black, and in one of the movie's most uncomfortable, disturbing scenes, she's paired up with another member of the group, Sandra (white), who advocates the return of the death penalty to Brazil and represents the parents of children gunned down by criminals. Sandra going from "I respect your grief as a mother" to "but could your son have had a weapon? And between a criminal and the police, who is supposed to die? What's a cop supposed to do, get shot?" to openly admitting she wants cops to shoot suspected criminals is hair-raising. Another member of the therapy/interview/psychodrama group, btw, is an ex-cop who says that you are trained with alternate, non-lethal methods of dealing with criminals, but because using guns and shooting people is an option not going to have negative repercussions for you afterwards, in 90%, you go for the gun.
And then there's the victim of 1970s police torture, going to the actual cells where he was given electroshocks; he's also the one to find the YouTube clip of the same guy who is responsible with the death of Naisandy's mother. He's almost unbelievable zen when talking about all of this, except in the end, when after discussing the Orestes case, Naisandy, the group therapist and the director enact how they think a confrontation between Naisandy and her mother's killer would go, which is when José Roberto (the torture victim) loses it.
At the start of the movie, the introduction lettering quickly sums up the Oresteia and ends with telling the audience that the end of the Oresteia was possibly the first time in Western Culture when the "eye for an eye" principle was abandoned in favor of mercy, that this was a major step of civilisation. Which the movie also believes, but it also questions the cost if there are no repercussions at all for murder. And of course you don't have to go to Brazil to find a society where victims have to live with the perpetrators thereafter, so this hit home in so many ways for the audience. In the Q & A later, there was repeated praise from audience members for the fact the movie also includes present day violence, instead of exclusively 1970s cases, and the director pessimistically said: "We're going backwards right now. Backwards."
Brazil and so many other states, alas, which brings me to the next movie, the festival's sole Turkish contribution.
Frenzy (original title Abluka), directed by Emin Alper: has nothing to do with the late Hitchcock movie of the same name, though I think he might have liked this one. Here, too, the director was available for a Q & A afterwards, during which he observed that while he got the funding for this movie a few years ago partly from the Turkish cultural ministery back when he applied, he doubts he'd get it now, and concluded after the last question with an appeal: "We are sliding into a horrible dictatorship day by day. Tell Merkel to stop negotiating with Erdogan."
What the movie is about: Kadir is released from prison (what he was in prison for originally, we're never told) upon probation after almost two decades. He's given the task of joining a unit that investigates waste bins in Istanbul for bombs or remains of bomb making. His younger brother Ahmet, whom he last saw when Ahmet was 7, has a job which is just as much a comment on present and future: Ahmet is part of a team that's supposed to shoot wild dogs. Two thirds in, after we've seen lots of dog shooting - not really, btw, we see the guys shoot and we see dead dogs afterwards, we don't see fake dying of dogs) one of the movie's few openly satiric sequences, there is a news clip on tv where a state official goes on about the slander of evil foreign media claiming Turkey deals with its wild dog problem by shooting them, no, they're just tranquilized and then brought to loving animal shelters conforming to EU standards. Cue clip of cheerful animal shelter. (Obvious symbolism is obvious.)
To me, the movie felt a bit Terry Gilliam-esque, but not in a derivative way: it's dark both in the sense that most scenes are set at night and in terms of content, of the dystopia it is set in, but also full of black humor, until it isn't: Ahmet ends up secretly adopting one of the dogs he's supposed to shoot and hinding, hiding it at his house, which is the source of funny scenes but also Ahmet's paranoia spinning out of control (every time Kadir checks on him he thinks it's the police). Same with Kadir's plot: he's earnest in trying to help against the terrorist threat - and there's the occasional bomb explosion heard ever closer to where our heroes live to remind us it's not just the state making this up -, but also check points and soldiers driving throughout the city. Since Kadir is prone to project and imagine, what with having been in prison for years, the couple (friends of Ahmet's) in which house he ends up living quickly go from being objects of fantasy (especially the wife, Meral, whom he suspects of having an affair with Ahmet - she doesn't - mainly because he fancies her himself) to objects of dread (when they disappear and Ahmet, due to the hidden dog plot, never answers the door, Kadir thinks his hosts are really terrorists who have taken Ahmet hostage). And Kadir's paranoia spins out of control, too. In the case of both brothers, the movie makes the cas that it's the direct result of the conditions they live in, the climate of fear. The structur of the film is challenging; it starts linear but then keeps going back and thro as we keep changing perspectives between Kadir and Ahmet, which also means going back and thro in time (first we see what happens with one brother, then we go back and see what happened with the other), and there are increasing fantasy/dream sequences as their fears build up. This contributes to the surreal feeling and the way you're sucked into this world as a watcher, increasingly unable to discern what's real and what isn't as well.
A minor aspect that's different from not just Gilliam or Hitchcock but most "Western" movie storytelling: the way Meral is presented. Because, as I said, Kadir massively projects into her, both desire and fear, I think most movies would dwell on her figure and attractiveness, but while she's played by a pretty actress, this doesn't happen here. The camera doesn't treat her differently than it does her husband. When Kadir has burned his hand and she patches him up because she's nice, this is obviously a major moment for him, but not for Meral, and there's no sense of lingering on the brief physical contact. I suppose the fact that Meral doesn't wear a headscarf and at one point puts her hair in a clip in front of Kadir could be read as erotic if you're from, say, Saudi Arabia, but most Turkish origin women I've met don't wear headscarfs, especially from Istanbul, so.
The movie never specifies an era - could be set in the past (the director said when he first had the idea, around 2005-ish when Turkey was in a relatively peaceful era, he was thinking of the 1990s, but by the time the movie got actually made and finished it looked prophetic/commenting the present), present or future - and it avoids commenting just who the terrorists are. It just shows us a few people who aren't, but by the end of the movie have been classified as such by the state to cover up its collosal blunders, which is a statement by itself.
As with the previous movie: what it depicts is by no means singular to Turkey. Which makes it even more viscerally effective.
Not, but really, the two movies I saw yesterday were certainly compelling.
Orestes: directed by Rodrigo Siqueira: a Brazilian movie that is fiendishly difficult to categorize. The quick summary in the film festival catalogue made it sound like a modern day adaption of the Greek myth of the title, but then the lady introducing the movie called it a documentary. So which was it, I wondered, as the movie started, and as it turned out, it was both. How so?
Rodrigo Siqueira uses as a modern day adaption of the story of Orestes, specifically, the trial that concludes the Oresteia by Aischylos, as a framing device to interview and act out psychodrama/therapy with real victims of violence - violence by the state in the past (a lot of the movie deals with the still unacknowledged murders and torture during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, and n the present (police shooting down people despite having the option not to, otoh school children getting shot by criminal). The modern Orestes does never appear in the movie; he and the trial which is conducted by a real state and a real defense attorney are the only parts that are fictional. (So the director said in the Q & A later.)
Quite how the story of Orestes got adapted tells you immediately something about the focus: modern present day Orestes no longer kiled his mother to avenge his father, he killed his father to avenge his mother. (The gender reversal, of course, immediately also eliminates one of the biggest things to stick in the throat if you're reading or watching The Kindly Ones, i.e. the concluding drama of the Oresteia, to wit, Athena's argument that fathers should count more than mothers in terms of child loyalty.) The context in which his father killed his mother is specifically political and tied to recent Brazilian history: he was a goverment spy, she was an activist/militant in the group he infiltrated. The arguments in the trial are very political, too: for example, the state attorney says there's no way Orestes killling his father was spontanous because Orestes had to dwell on this for 37 years while the state refused to do anything but grant amnesty to all murderers and torturers of the military dictatorship.
But like I said, this is only the framing narration, or if you like the skeleton, and the meant of the movie are the true stories.The one with the most obvious parallel to the adapted myth is that of Nasaindy, whose mother, Soledad, was killed (pregnant) by a government spy in her movement she had an affair with. Because the guy in question already knew her when they were trained in Cuba, when Soledad was with Nasaindy's father, another fellow militant who died, and because no photos of the father exist (at least no complete ones, Nasaindy has one where you can see male hands holding her which she thinks were his), she did/does wonder the inevitable: whether her mother's murderer (currently alive and well, there's a YouTube clip played with him in his blithe "ah well, saved democracy from the domino effect, didn't I?" smugness that's chilling) wasn't also her father.
Then there's Eliana, whose son, a drug addict, was gunned down, despite not having carried a weapon. Eliana is black, and in one of the movie's most uncomfortable, disturbing scenes, she's paired up with another member of the group, Sandra (white), who advocates the return of the death penalty to Brazil and represents the parents of children gunned down by criminals. Sandra going from "I respect your grief as a mother" to "but could your son have had a weapon? And between a criminal and the police, who is supposed to die? What's a cop supposed to do, get shot?" to openly admitting she wants cops to shoot suspected criminals is hair-raising. Another member of the therapy/interview/psychodrama group, btw, is an ex-cop who says that you are trained with alternate, non-lethal methods of dealing with criminals, but because using guns and shooting people is an option not going to have negative repercussions for you afterwards, in 90%, you go for the gun.
And then there's the victim of 1970s police torture, going to the actual cells where he was given electroshocks; he's also the one to find the YouTube clip of the same guy who is responsible with the death of Naisandy's mother. He's almost unbelievable zen when talking about all of this, except in the end, when after discussing the Orestes case, Naisandy, the group therapist and the director enact how they think a confrontation between Naisandy and her mother's killer would go, which is when José Roberto (the torture victim) loses it.
At the start of the movie, the introduction lettering quickly sums up the Oresteia and ends with telling the audience that the end of the Oresteia was possibly the first time in Western Culture when the "eye for an eye" principle was abandoned in favor of mercy, that this was a major step of civilisation. Which the movie also believes, but it also questions the cost if there are no repercussions at all for murder. And of course you don't have to go to Brazil to find a society where victims have to live with the perpetrators thereafter, so this hit home in so many ways for the audience. In the Q & A later, there was repeated praise from audience members for the fact the movie also includes present day violence, instead of exclusively 1970s cases, and the director pessimistically said: "We're going backwards right now. Backwards."
Brazil and so many other states, alas, which brings me to the next movie, the festival's sole Turkish contribution.
Frenzy (original title Abluka), directed by Emin Alper: has nothing to do with the late Hitchcock movie of the same name, though I think he might have liked this one. Here, too, the director was available for a Q & A afterwards, during which he observed that while he got the funding for this movie a few years ago partly from the Turkish cultural ministery back when he applied, he doubts he'd get it now, and concluded after the last question with an appeal: "We are sliding into a horrible dictatorship day by day. Tell Merkel to stop negotiating with Erdogan."
What the movie is about: Kadir is released from prison (what he was in prison for originally, we're never told) upon probation after almost two decades. He's given the task of joining a unit that investigates waste bins in Istanbul for bombs or remains of bomb making. His younger brother Ahmet, whom he last saw when Ahmet was 7, has a job which is just as much a comment on present and future: Ahmet is part of a team that's supposed to shoot wild dogs. Two thirds in, after we've seen lots of dog shooting - not really, btw, we see the guys shoot and we see dead dogs afterwards, we don't see fake dying of dogs) one of the movie's few openly satiric sequences, there is a news clip on tv where a state official goes on about the slander of evil foreign media claiming Turkey deals with its wild dog problem by shooting them, no, they're just tranquilized and then brought to loving animal shelters conforming to EU standards. Cue clip of cheerful animal shelter. (Obvious symbolism is obvious.)
To me, the movie felt a bit Terry Gilliam-esque, but not in a derivative way: it's dark both in the sense that most scenes are set at night and in terms of content, of the dystopia it is set in, but also full of black humor, until it isn't: Ahmet ends up secretly adopting one of the dogs he's supposed to shoot and hinding, hiding it at his house, which is the source of funny scenes but also Ahmet's paranoia spinning out of control (every time Kadir checks on him he thinks it's the police). Same with Kadir's plot: he's earnest in trying to help against the terrorist threat - and there's the occasional bomb explosion heard ever closer to where our heroes live to remind us it's not just the state making this up -, but also check points and soldiers driving throughout the city. Since Kadir is prone to project and imagine, what with having been in prison for years, the couple (friends of Ahmet's) in which house he ends up living quickly go from being objects of fantasy (especially the wife, Meral, whom he suspects of having an affair with Ahmet - she doesn't - mainly because he fancies her himself) to objects of dread (when they disappear and Ahmet, due to the hidden dog plot, never answers the door, Kadir thinks his hosts are really terrorists who have taken Ahmet hostage). And Kadir's paranoia spins out of control, too. In the case of both brothers, the movie makes the cas that it's the direct result of the conditions they live in, the climate of fear. The structur of the film is challenging; it starts linear but then keeps going back and thro as we keep changing perspectives between Kadir and Ahmet, which also means going back and thro in time (first we see what happens with one brother, then we go back and see what happened with the other), and there are increasing fantasy/dream sequences as their fears build up. This contributes to the surreal feeling and the way you're sucked into this world as a watcher, increasingly unable to discern what's real and what isn't as well.
A minor aspect that's different from not just Gilliam or Hitchcock but most "Western" movie storytelling: the way Meral is presented. Because, as I said, Kadir massively projects into her, both desire and fear, I think most movies would dwell on her figure and attractiveness, but while she's played by a pretty actress, this doesn't happen here. The camera doesn't treat her differently than it does her husband. When Kadir has burned his hand and she patches him up because she's nice, this is obviously a major moment for him, but not for Meral, and there's no sense of lingering on the brief physical contact. I suppose the fact that Meral doesn't wear a headscarf and at one point puts her hair in a clip in front of Kadir could be read as erotic if you're from, say, Saudi Arabia, but most Turkish origin women I've met don't wear headscarfs, especially from Istanbul, so.
The movie never specifies an era - could be set in the past (the director said when he first had the idea, around 2005-ish when Turkey was in a relatively peaceful era, he was thinking of the 1990s, but by the time the movie got actually made and finished it looked prophetic/commenting the present), present or future - and it avoids commenting just who the terrorists are. It just shows us a few people who aren't, but by the end of the movie have been classified as such by the state to cover up its collosal blunders, which is a statement by itself.
As with the previous movie: what it depicts is by no means singular to Turkey. Which makes it even more viscerally effective.
