Mayis Sikintisi

It was an interesting movie.

Visually great.

But sometimes it's repulsive that NBC wants to make movies like - Tarkovsky.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has taken the sensitive, beautiful, rich cinematography and directing that he used on Kasaba and has successfully applied these to a more complex and expansive film. This time, there is a plot, a storyline that follows how several of the characters are trying to address certain problems that they face. Specifically, these are Muzzafer's desire to make a film, his father's desire to claim and keep a plot of woodland, and his cousin's desire to leave the small town and move to Istanbul. The plot is not too complex, it is not "exciting," there is no great, complete culmination, yet it is powerful and emotional nonetheless. We follow the characters and their efforts to address the issues in a calm, but beautiful and sensitive manner.

Like Kasaba, this film's strong points are great beauty and showing "real" events and characters in a pure, simple form. The humour, emotion, and drama are subtle, yet the film succeeds in evoking strong emotion and empathy with the characters. There is no overt sadness, anger, happiness, etc., demonstrated strongly in the film, but the viewer can feel these very strongly.

In part, this is due to the film maker's very sensitive, artistic techniques and abilities, but there is more. The actors are on the whole simply wonderful. They succeed so well at being extremely convincing and subtly creating great emotion and richness of character, so that the viewer can easily understand the greater meaning to a small gesture or phrase. As before in Kasaba, I particularly love Emin Ceylan, who plays the father/grandfather, but they are all wonderful, including Muzaffer Ozdemir and Emin Toprak.

While the ending may seem a little inconclusive, it nevertheless provides some resolution or at least new realisations about the three main issues facing characters. Again, this is handled subtly and beautifully.

In the end, this film is visually beautiful and convincingly portrays events and characters simply, without being "done up" and in a manner that evokes great empathy. It thus succeeds beautifully at its apparent goals.

Reading other evaluations of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's MAYIS SIKINTISI (CLOUDS OF MAY), we see some familiar adjectives ("slight," "poetic," "atmospheric") that are frequently invoked without any real attempt to engage with the film's major preoccupations.

Set in the northwest village of Yenice in Çanakkale province (the district where the battle of Gallipoli was fought in 1915), Ceylan focuses on Emin (played by the director's father M. Emin Ceylan), a landowner of some standing, who is trying to fight the government's plan to cut down some trees on his land that have stood for over seven decades. The echoes of Chekhov's THE CHERRY ORCHARD are obvious: like the earlier play, the trees in MAYIS SIKINTISI serve as a metaphor for an enduring rural life under threat from industrialization. In the pursuit of immediate financial gain, whole tracts of land are being sacrificed to the bulldozer. Emin spends most of his time learning the niceties of the law so as to fight the government on their own terms; if he can prove them wrong, then he will have emerged successful.

Yet Ceylan reveals the irony of Emin's position, as his obsession with the law blinds him to the real truths of life contained in the rural landscape - the elements, the trees, mountains and foliage, all of which have been there for centuries and will outlast all the protagonists. We are made aware of its importance through the soundtrack, which sacrifices dialogue to sound - birds cheeping, the breeze rustling through the trees, the sound of footfall on the wooded ground. Humans are intimately connected to the universe; once they become aware of their kinship with all living creatures, including the birds, bees, insects and flowers, they lose their obsession with materialism.

MAYIS SIKINTISI introduces a second level of irony through the presence of Emin's son Muzaffer (Muzaffer Özdemir), who like Ceylan himself is trying to make a film set in his hometown using his family as actors. The film-within-a-film structure enables Ceylan to criticize his own profession; the obsession with shot- construction, light, sound and the "correct" delivery of lines renders Muzaffer as myopic as his father. Although making a film about nature, he is impervious to it. What matters more to him are mundane details such as the cost of film stock, or ensuring that he can work together with his İstanbul-based friend Sadık (Sadık İncesu).

Within this complex format Ceylan makes some more pragmatic points about the advantages and disadvantages of rural life. Although the local community provides a source of support for Emin and his family, it can prove restricting. This is especially true for Saffet (Emin Toprak) who has failed once more to enter university and has to spend his days laboring in a factory. He desperately wants to leave his hometown and try his chances in İstanbul; but as Muzaffer informs him, the opportunities therein are limited. City and country remain forever separate; those who migrate in search of their fortunes often end up disillusioned.

Stylistically speaking, MAYIS SIKINTISI unfolds slowly with the emphasis placed on image rather than narrative. Viewers should focus on the mise-en-scene - the relationship of sound to vision, and the placement of characters within the frame - rather than expecting a story to unfold. By such means they should be able to understand Ceylan's enduring preoccupation with the elemental world, and how we might continue to appreciate it despite our apparent obsession with personal and social advancement.

Having seen this movie had the same effect on me as I first saw "tree with the wooden clogs" by Ermanno Olmi. It was like being part of a real life (of real people). No imitations, no caricatures, nothing artificial, nothing but the life itself as we all live it. Yes there is love, there are expectations, there are hopes, everything that is part of life is here. It's these art pieces that still give me hope for humanity. They make us see how pure we all are, despite everything imposed on us by commercial approaches in Hollywood cinema.

The dialogs, the acting, the directing all support this pure approach in this film. Human beings are all reflected in this movie without any makeup (in both sense). The director's first full length movie "Kasaba -The Town" was a small masterpiece. Now this movie proves that he can still create masterpieces, even when he enlarges his vision.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's second feature film, a sequel to Kasaba. It shocked and impressed me in the final act. When I look at it now, it really shows what Ceylan can do in future.