danbes Reviews

Bes Vakit (2006)

Life in a Turkish mountain village is pretty miserable.

[4/10 · 26 December 2012]

While there's nothing wrong with creating a film that says life is pretty much a drag for young people who are innocent victims of their parents and grandparents traditional ways, this film beats the theme to death.

For me, the film primarily rings with one quality: hopelessness. Filled with symbolism designed, I believe, to express the filmmaker's view that the preadolescents we meet are pretty much resigned to life as it is, and without even a hint that they have any way out of their situation, the film, while photographed beautifully, and with competent acting by most of the characters, emerges as little more than a turgid overview of a rural life that few westerners have been witness to on the screen.

There are far better films that do the same thing. I think of Bicycle Thieves, of the Apu trilogy, of Sugar Cane Alley, and of several other titles that bare witness to humans (young people especially) living lives of "quiet desperation" (as Thoreau put it), but which do so in ways that indicate the reasons, and which also present their characters as people who at least make an attempt to struggle against a situation they little understand and of which they are the victim.

Don't avoid the Times and Winds. See it, but do so as a lesson in how an inadequate film could have been so much more.

Dan Bessie / [e-mail]

Behind the Sun (2001)

A marvelous film about the futility wrought by violence and phony "family honor"

[10/10 · 27 January 2007]

Hollywood rarely has the courage to produce films such as this small masterpiece. From the plot to the acting to the cinematography, this is one of the finest films I've seen in 60 years of appreciating cinema. This is a slow paced film, but don't let that put you off. In fact, don't even think "slow paced." Instead, expect a harmonic blend capturing the life, times, and spirit of the hardworking people who populate the story.

Attempting to scratch out an existence milling sugar cane, these farmers in Brazil's rural outback (the film is set in 1910) are caught up in a land-squabble-based blood feud that's apparently gone on for decades. Not only is everything about the film superb, but the surprising yet completely logical twist that climaxes the story provides a remarkable take on "family honor" - a take that lets us know that seeing value in the lives of others can sometimes come from unexpected places.

Makes for hours of fascinating discussion; the kind of film that makes one THINK.

By all means, see it!

M (1931)

powerful drama, yet also psychologically penetrating

[1 January 2003]

Not only is M a great thriller, it's also one of the few films that tries, through Peter Lorre's impassioned plea at his "trial" to argue that many child molesters are not merely crazed animals. That they are sick individuals, themselves the product of warped circumstances, and often capable of being helped, with care and treatment, to become useful members of society.