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Retrospective Life and Lost Traditions
Turkish director Samy Kaplanoglu, who entered the film industry at the age of 38 "at the age of 38" with his debut film [The End of the World is Everywhere], once quipped, "Even in the In Turkey, there are really very few people who watch my films." Slow plot, seemingly aimless scenery, endless long shots, Kaplanoglu's "artistic pursuit" has always been insisted on, and even the Hungarian people who have always been cultivated by Bela Tarr have "heavy taste" for him. The previous work [Milk] was overwhelmed. But in Berlin this year, a German journalist who was seriously sleep deprived, after catching up with the [Honey] at 9:00 in the morning, sincerely sighed, "This is indeed a challenge, but it's really worth it", which is enough to illustrate the film itself. charm. [Honey] is the last part of Kaplanoglu's "Youssef trilogy", continuing the slow, quiet overall style of the first two, but a little different because the protagonist is an autistic boy.
The entire "Youssef trilogy" adopts a relatively rare reverse narrative. Yusuf is a grassroots poet who grew up in Anatolia, a small village near the Black Sea. He is nearing the age of no confusion, and his life is decadent. Although there are books published, they can only be circulated among small groups. He himself also wanders the streets all day long, developing a relationship with a woman that seems to have nothing to do with it, and finally because of the death of his mother. Returning to his homeland - he abandoned his homeland at first, but now it is finally his turn to be abandoned by this bloodline. In 2008, Yosef in [Milk] had just graduated from high school, and some poems were published in magazines, but the spiritual honor did not change his poor life with his mother, who depended on milking to deliver milk, joined the army, and wrote poems. At that time, he was full of confusion, and just had the idea of running away. In today's [Honey], Yosef is just a six-year-old boy, and Kaplanoglu begins to explain his life from the origin of life.
Withdrawal, introversion, stuttering, dyslexia, these keywords obviously made it difficult for a six-year-old boy to grow up. Yusuf had difficulty establishing regular relationships with his peers, and was estranged from his mother. The only one who could communicate loudly and clearly The object is only the father. And it was his most trusted father who hurt him all his life-he never came back after he decided to go out to make a living, so the mother and son in [milk] struggled to make a living, and Uther in [egg] Her husband's indifference and indifference all have the basis of fate. One of the details in [egg] is this, after Yusuf learned the news of his mother's death, he found a lawyer without emotion, made phone calls, discussed inheritance matters, and even even his mother's last words designated him to go back to his hometown to complete the "holy vow" They all wanted to shirk, the scene was like Albert Camus' "The Outsider", but when Yosef was standing alone in a corner of the small town, dazedly facing the air, he suddenly had a seizure, collapsed with convulsions, and suddenly heard the mosque beside him. He was singing the prayer of the dead, but the time was evening, not the morning when the prayer of the dead should have been sounded - that was his subconscious calling for the emotion he had buried deep in his heart. In today's [Honey], the director gave the scene of Yusuf and his father living in harmony when he was a child: they walked together in the quiet forest, Yusuf assisted his father to throw the rope into the high tree branch, and watched his father climb Go up the tree trunk and take down the beehive; they sit side by side in a room where the natural light is gradually dimmed, as if they do not know the morning and evening, the small room is filled with the tacit understanding of parent and child - and these are exactly in [egg] and [milk]. Desperately missing, and desperately in need of recovery. The final scene in the movie takes place in a dark forest. You can only see the swaying figure of Yosef in a white shirt who decides to set out to find his father, and hear the thunderstorm, as if seeing the complicated inner world of this inexpressible child.
As Kaplanoglu said, the reason for using food as the title of the film is that eggs, milk and honey are the most common foods on the table of Turks. The reverse display of Yusuf's growth experience also proves that The director's backtracking and a little anxiety about the Turkish tradition. In [Egg], a craftsman carefully ties a fishing net with an original device, a group of young people dressed in modern clothes are rehearsing a folk dance, and Yosef's mother's "holy vow" is for him to sacrifice to God in the most traditional way Sacrifice a sheep, but Yosef admitted that he no longer believed in this. [Milk] is the milking technique that Yosef's mother relies on to survive gradually being replaced by machines. When it came to [Honey] this time, the director chose this small village with inconvenient transportation by the Black Sea, lived among the beekeepers for a while, and vowed to record something for those kind-hearted people. "The people here still follow the ancient living traditions—— Some of the habits of life, religious ceremonies and the act of gathering and praying are very fragile cultures and we need to protect it.” So Caplanoglu showed us many primitive ways of extracting honey, traditional sacrifices and dances, and also Passing on his most precious childhood memories-the tacit understanding and intimacy with his father to Joseph and his beekeeper father, provided the only warm memory for Yusuf's later unhappy life, because, as we already know, In Yusuf's future days, he did not reach that modern paradise, he still couldn't find his place among the skyscrapers, and he was at a loss in this childhood world in [Honey].
The beginning of the utterly quiet and utterly beautiful
[Honey] takes you up to five minutes to get into that poetic situation: the camera freezes on the forest scene, as if to hear something fluttering in the trees, for a moment, A man led a donkey into the frame slowly, and the camera followed him like that. For a long time, finally, he stopped, threw a rope on the branch, and began to climb up, but the branch suddenly broke, and the camera finally stopped. He started to look down at the helpless man who fell from the broken branch of the tree. He was Yosef's father who was picking wild honey everywhere to support his family.
Although following the same video style, the biggest difference from [Egg] and [Milk], where most of the stories take place in towns, is that [Honey] puts almost all eyes on Yosef as a child and spends most of his time The forest, his hometown, is the spiritual home where the autistic, melancholy and congenitally defective brewed the blood of the poet. On the way Yosef accompanied his father to find the wild bee hive, the long shot slowly slid over the swaying wildflowers. When the father and son were taking a nap, a deer peeked out from the side and suddenly jumped over Yosef's shoulder. The reflection of the moon was rippling in the water, and was gently scattered by the hands of the water, everything was like a fairy tale dream.
Watching Kaplanoglu's films brings back memories of the Indian director Satyajit Rey who made the "Apu trilogy", whether it's a deep nostalgia for the land and tradition, or a poetic The lens language outlines the mutual enjoyment of humans and nature. You must know that the entire "Youssef Trilogy" has no soundtrack, and Yusuf himself in [Honey] is a taciturn autistic child, resulting in almost no dialogue for most of the film, so follow along The pictures are all the original sounds of nature, and Caplanoglu was able to capture the tiniest movements of nature, and the emotions emanating from the story became more and more expansive. From this point of view, [Honey] is a difficult film for some people. After all, today's audiences have long been accustomed to all kinds of exaggerated modifications, colors, music, sound effects, CG, in contrast, [ Honey] is almost nothing, not even the slightest artificial addition of lighting. But from the other side, [Honey] is simply a film that is not allowed to be effective, because it faces the most essential land and the most essential people, so it deeply moved Herzo, who has always advocated nature. Greg, perhaps his statement that "giving the Golden Bear to [Honey] was a decision we made in just 10 seconds" was a bit of an exaggeration, but for Caplanoglu, "whatever happened here The tree is still the tree, and the grass is still the grass.”
Originally published in "Watching the Movie" March 2010
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