Yol

"There's pity in one corner of my heart, and hatred in the other"

When I think of Turkish cinema I usually imagine Bollywood-esque posters on the windows of Middle Eastern shops in Fairfield. These posters are always faded, and look like they've been rescued from some alternative universe where the world never left the early 1980s behind. They're garish and mythic-looking, appealing to a captive Turkish-language audience uninfected with cynicism. It's a parallel cinema that gets next to zero coverage from western film critics... when was the last time Roger Ebert reviewed a Bollywood or populist arabic-language film? Probably never. Anyway, I digress... Yol doesn't really fit into this paradigm, it's probably the most internationally famous Turkish film of all time, coming from a political context that sets it outside of mainstream Turkish culture. It's a film about working class Turks living in prison, made by Yilmaz Guney, a Kurdish political dissident who (as he was in prison at the time of the film's production) had to instruct his assistant by mail on how he wanted Yol directed. Guney then escaped from prison and fled to Switzerland, where he edited the film in post-production. The Turkish government at the time banned it, and it went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Yol is a story about the post-coup Turkey of the early '80s, the new regime, and the people live under it. The protagonists of this film are imprisoned Turks who have been given some holiday leave from prison in order to visit their families. These guys aren't really criminals in the western sense, they're mostly regular people who have turned to crime due to poverty, and are poor because they're mostly uneducated. These brothers-of-the-road return to their changed family lives in a changed Turkey, and must adjust to the world that has moved on in their absence. Through this handful of characters Yol looks at various aspects of Turkish life... the city, the country, the oppression of the Kurds by the Turkish military, amateur dentistry, and notions of honour and fidelity in a culture that's still inherently conservative despite the superficial freedoms they're allowed. Also, everyone has a moustache and everyone smokes (even the children)... it's a cultural thing.

In a way, Yol is a film about Turkish culture that has been made for the rest of the world to witness. There's an awkward contrast of values in this culture that fuels much of the underlying tragedy in each character's life... on the surface Turkey looks much like a typical European country; modern cities, advanced political infrastructure, and a certain worldy awareness that sets the country apart from other predominantly Islamic Middle Eastern nations. But there's still a code of customs relating to honour and shame that underpins everything, and in a way Gunay implies that this is the true source of each character's misery. Yol starts out optimistic but also foreboding, with the prisoners sharing jokes as they anticipate seeing their families again with some degree of hope. This tone gradually deteriorates as they all come to realise that Turkey isn't a welcoming or forgiving place, and they're each beset by personal tragedies. These are men who become increasinly aware that they will have to live with their sins for a long time yet.

There's Mehmet (Halil Ergun), put in jail because of his involvement in a jewellery heist, who emerges into the outside world to face an even greater crime - the betrayal of his brother-in-law. This act carries a seperate sentence for him, with his inlaws refusing to allow him to see his wife. Another prisoner is Omer (Necmettin Cobanoglu), who comes home to find his Kurdish village desolate and locked down by soldiers - he plans to try and cross the border to Syria to avoid returning to prison. The other main character is Seyit (Tarik Akan), returns home to find that his wife has dishonoured his family by working as a prostitute and abandoning their son. She is kept chained up in a remote location, awaiting his return so he can administer an honour killing. This leads to one of the most starkly unforgiving and harsh sequences in the film, with Seyit leading his wife and son through a blizzard-swept wilderness, whipping her as they drag her through the snow so that she won't fall asleep and die. Custom dictates that he should let her die, but all the fight has gone out of him, and he keeps his wedding ring on as a reminder of the small measure of happiness he once had.

Some of Yol's more memorable scenes include the following:

• Mehmet and his wife attempt to have sex in a train toilet but an angry mob beseiges them due to the 'evil' and 'shameful' nature of this act.
• Seyit whips his tired horse to death in the winter wilderness before shooting it, foreshadowing his meeting with his dishonourable wife. The audience expects him to treat his wife in a similar fashion, but this expectation is turned on its head at the last possible moment.
• The border massacre where soldiers apologise afterwards and ask the Kurdish villagers to check the flyblown corpses for relatives.
  

Guney and his assistant Serif Goren are no bums when it comes to directing, the film has a doco-like feel that rumbles along at a fairly energetic pace in the first act, reinforced by neverending incidental music that's a mix between traditional turkish arrangements and ominous-sounding synthesiser. Yol goes from here into some fairly dense subplots that have little relation to one another, demonstrating a thopught-provoking cultural exploration that shows rather than tells. It's worth keeping in mind that the point isn't to damn Turkish culture in its entirety, the traditions that Guney rallies against are presented as sources of social misery in need ot ref0rm. The martial-law/police state elements are also at the forefront of this. It's an often shocking film, but its all presented in a such a matter-of-fact and undidactic way that it's quite easy to accept this depiction of Turkey as sincere and morose rather than exaggerated and angry. Does that make sense? I guess you'll have to see it to make up your mind. Nevertheless, there's a reason why this is the most critically-acclaimed Turkish film ever made, and I found it to be a moving experience.

DIRECTOR: Yilmaz Guney, Serif Goren
WRITER/SOURCE: Yilmaz Guney
KEY ACTORS: Tarik Akan, Halil Ergun, Necmettin Cobanoglu, Serif Sezer, Meril Orhonsay

RELATED TEXTS:
- Some other major films by Yilmez Guney: Umut, The Enemy and The Wall.
- A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly, Half Moon and Marooned in Iraq is are more recent Iranian films that look specifically at Kurdish concerns.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - won the FIPRESCI Prize, the Palme d'Or, a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury.
Golden Globes - nominated for Best Foreign Film.