HONEY /PRESS

03.2010
Honeymoon in Berlin
Aytaç Köktürk - Altyazı

HONEY
Dir: Semih Kaplanoğlu

Bal, the last instalment in S.Kaplanoglu's Yusuf Trilogy focuses on the childhood of Yusuf, the trilogy's protagonist. While keeping the father-son relationship in focus, Kaplanoglu creates an intellectual and emotional atmosphere where experiencing mockery, weakness at times, vulnerability, patience, harmony with nature, overcoming the hardships, manual skills, standing on his own feet, contentment nurtured with patience is interwoven.

Exhibiting a heterodox spirituality that relies largely on Islam, film features a universally spiritual tone with interfaith references although the particular story is about a family in a mountain village in the north, by the Black sea coast. It is plausible to think that there is an analogy of prophet Joseph and Jacob in the sub-context of the film. Yusuf's father bearing the name Yakup, Yusuf's dreams coming true, the gazelle appearing by the river, the father's advice of not telling anybody his dreams, Yusuf's dream in Yumurta (Egg) where he sees himself stranded in a well are instrumental to help us draw that connection.

Bal is obviously inspired and affected by various art forms such as Rimbaud's poems, Vermeer's paintings as well short story and novel. The film employs a self-consistent technique for dealing with the theme though improvising it each time around the certain problematic that is Yusuf's life. It has a strong calling for poetry and poetic elements in cinema in the fashion of Tarkovsky.

Meanwhile, we observe the signs that will lead to shape up the character we have observed in the earlier instalments. The weakness of human under natural and social circumstances, feelings of resentment and adaptation; all these feelings get across to the audience strongly. So the film manages to pull off a literary profoundness as well as a cinematic one.

Bal depicts the human's relationship with nature and his critical curiosity towards his culture with strong cinematography. Kaplanoğlu, makes a powerful film where strict rationality doesn't dominate spiritual culture, rather sophisticated reality of Turkey is open to discussion, the marginal lives are not represented rather presented, the dialectic relationship isn't overlooked and also humane rational is emphasized.