Le lait

Must be hard if not impossible trying to make a life for yourself as an "intellectual" as we say in my country when you come from a village in the middle of nowhere. Life is tough out there and art and artists have no place.

The director is serving us visuals left and right and I'm here for it. Those ancient ruins coming out of nowhere in the beginning, actually that entire scene with that girl that actually came to nothing and we never see her again. But most of all that snake extraction scene was so gnarly. I have never seen anything like it in my life. Is that even possible? Again towards the middle I was wondering what the whole point of that scene was, since the woman was not Yusuf's mother as I had thought and it looked completely unrelated, but the snake whisperer makes another appearance. And we have another snake, of course. And a gigantic catfish towards the end.

It's a slow movie with plenty of natural landscape, like the other ones, farm scenes, but also shabby houses and old style interior decor, but it's all familiar in a way because it's pretty much the same in my country. Same with the poverty and lack of opportunity for people living in rural areas or in small towns. Nothing much happens objectively speaking, but there's a lot going on inside the main character's head. Could be one of several things, in fact you are left to fill in a lot for yourself, without any confirmation. There's clearly a lot going through Yusuf's mind.

It was funny when he found out his mother had a private life, till I remembered Turkey had honor killings and I got a little worried for a second or two, but this movie does not go there. In fact I was thinking at the very end that the most beautiful that his mother had ever looked was through his own eyes. And maybe the girl he was describing in his poem was in fact his own mother. In an innocent, needy way of course. She had raised him by herself and it's clear he wasn't social at all. She must have been his whole universe for a long time.

It took me a long time to sit down to watch this movie, in between the first and the last of the series because I couldn't find it in a decent version. In fact I had to watch it with Spanish subs, and I'm not fluent in Spanish, let alone in reading Spanish. Thankfully the dialogue is sparse and curt. I'm a little obsessed with getting the dialogue right so I paused it often to be able to read it in Spanish, but I got it.

This film is about a sensitive young man called Yusuf (Melih Selcuk), who is resistant to the harsh realities of becoming a man in modern Turkey, preferring instead his rustic ideal of living from the land with his mother. I seem to remember Joseph Heller writing in his novel Something Happened that we lose three quarters of who we are in the process of becoming an adult. Of course some people weren't ever really individuals in the first case, and on the other hand some are particularly ill-suited to this Procrustean process. Yusuf is one of the latter. He's a solitary young man who writes poetry, reads books and wanders in the countryside. He's up for national service, which I believe generally comes at the age of twenty in Turkey. Apparently national service is seen as a very important institution by the Turkish, one can even be prosecuted for defaming it. So one might see it as a rite of passage. On the one hand someone of an artistic temperament may not be enthusiastic about joining the military, on the other missing out means being separated from the flock and a symbolic ascension(?) to adulthood. Yusuf fails the medical because he is epileptic. This is a cause of much anger within him. He's desperate to be a man, mostly in fact so that he can gain some respect from his mother, whom he adores. This is quite a crucial point, his mother loves him dearly, on the other hand she does not respect him.

There is also a difficulty in that his mother has met a man in town, an official. So she is growing away from her son and neglecting the farm work. I think Yusuf would like to live in a traditional manner, making money from the land with his mother, selling produce at market, and reading and writing poetry in his cosy study. One might suspect incestuous longings, however I think it's much more of a Platonic idolisation, after the fashion of Leonardo or Pasolini.

Yusuf is quite good at poetry, and has one of his poems published in Düsler Öyküler (a Turkish literary journal, literally Dreams Short Stories). It's actually about his mother, but she thinks it's about a local girl.

So what I haven't perhaps explained yet it that this is a drastically beautiful film, this phase in Yusuf's life is shown with a natural unmannered beauty. There is one scene where he is picked up by a local girl and they drive out to a secluded rural location, she is either receiving texts or phone calls on her mobile every half minute and so he doesn't get much of a look in. He walks into the ruins of a Turkish bathhouse and has a wander inside. We then see the girl's silhouette stroll along the skylight, it's a symbol of her unattainability. It's one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a while. Yusuf is not the sort you would see with a mobile phone, an idyll is what he's looking for, uninterrupted by ring-tones.

The film is clearly interested in the transition to adulthood, which is unforgiving, and in a small strand we have a friend of Yusuf's who is also a struggling poet, though not yet published, working as a miner (complete with poems stuffed under his shirt and day-glo hazard jacket. It's seemingly a huge violation to become an adult, that's my opinion any way. I value artistic representations of the sacredness of each individual and their imagination. In a quite brilliant shot we see this represented by the miner's light on the hard hat of the friend, approaching the camera. This theme of what it means to become an adult actually reminded me of the story of the young man Ismail from Ceylan's 2008 work Üç maymun (Three Monkeys).

It's probably best to explain why the title of the film is Milk! It has more than one meaning for sure, Yusuf and his mother have a couple of cows, and they attempt to make a living by selling the milk but also by making cheese and other milk-related delicacies, as well as fruit and vegetables. Milk is also obviously the nourishment provided to you by your mother. I think it's also enlarged here so that it also refers just to life itself, even in one scene we see an exorcism where the fumes of boiled milk are used. The exorcism is also a real one, you see an obviously supernatural event in the film. Which is unusual at the cinema unless you are watching a tongue-in-cheek horror film. It speaks bounds of the director's connection with traditions, the countryside and a mystical magic real existence.

I was thinking actually whilst watching this film that it could well be a type of "Antoine Doinel" type series. After reading about it I've found that's it's actually the second part in a trilogy about Yusuf's life.

By the by, Basak Köklükaya as the mother has a leonine immutable beauty that is quite inspiring, a perfect choice as a mother for Yusuf to idolise.

Semih Kaplanoglu, remember the name, this guy has got talent in abundance. Makes me feel like a human being again watching movies like this.

It's hard for a viewer who's used to watching James Bond films to get into Süt. This is the second film of the "Yusuf Trilogy" written and directed by the talented Turkish director Yusuf Kaplanoglu and it precedes Yumurta, so you know what you're up to. Long shots, very little camera motion a very simple actual story, which doesn't have an obvious, Hollywood-like plot twist or ending.

On the other hand, it includes a very long story about the social change the "location" is going through and also a very long story about the change the main character has to face. This long story part is not told through any means of action of course, because basically everybody knows what a teenager has to go through. That part is left to the viewer, to be gained as impressions from the moving paintings of Kaplanoglu's film.

Süt is simply close to film as an art form. Multi-layered, pure, not filled with unnecessary dialogs. Sometimes an image on the background, sometimes an animal or sometimes even a bright light carries the flow of ideas. Viewer needs to think about it, read about it, maybe see it once more and after all these steps, may still like or dislike the film. That's a personal taste nobody can change in the end but this whole process is worth the effort.

Süt was -for me- more difficult to get into than Yumurta. Basak Koklukaya is close to perfect but Melih Selcuk is I think, not really up to the job he has in his hands. The third film of the trilogy will be Bal and will paint the childhood of Yusuf.

Stylistically speaking, SÜT (MILK) contains several of the devices commonly associated with director Semih Kaplanoğlu's work: long takes in which characters are seen to move through the frame; an absence of music or other sonic devices, save for the sounds of birds cheeping, lorries passing by on the road, or the sounds of daily life in a small town; and a concentration on the landscape at different times of the day. The story might be important, but so is the context in which it is set.

The film follows on from BAL (HONEY) - actually released two years after SÜT - by focusing on the adolescent Yusuf (Melih Selcuk) and his mother Zehra (Başak Köklükaya). They have now moved from the Black Sea to Tire in the west of the country, and eke out an existence by keeping a small herd of cattle and selling the milk to local people. This is a precarious life at best; when Yusuf fails to show up at a local apartment block with the daily deliveries, the customers turn away from him. Zehra seeks solace in the arms of the local station-master (Şerif Erol), which increases Yusuf's sense of alienation from his world.

Thematically speaking SÜT examines a world undergoing significant change: the rural way of life is being threatened by unrestricted urban development, with apartment blocks springing up all around Yusuf's town. Whereas once everyone would have been farmers, now they find gainful employment on the building-site. This might provide a stable source of income, but comes at a price: human beings are transformed into automata, with little time to reflect on the world. We see Yusuf's friend Erol (Orçun Kökşal) bemoaning the lack of opportunity to write poetry due to the exigencies of his job.

Yet it seems that the world has no place for poets any more. Yusuf's teacher Ali (Rıza Akın) - who was shown trying to teach writing to the young Yusuf in BAL - spends most of his days in the local bar drinking beer and reading newspapers, with neither the time nor the inclination to comment on his protegé's poetic efforts. Although Yusuf experiences the thrill of seeing his efforts in print, they do not help him to improve his existence. Kaplanoğlu underlines the sterility of his life by showing him sat at a typewriter in a darkened room next to a barred window - the classic prison-image.

In his daily life, Yusuf has an ambivalent relationship to his antique motor-cycle. While providing him and his mother with their sole mode of transport - so that they can sell their produce in the center of town - Yusuf is clearly ill-at-ease while driving it. In one sequence he falls off spectacularly, and is shown lying on the ground, foam trickling from the side of his mouth. Like his late father (in BAL) he is prone to epileptic fits. Contemporary societies have little or no use for such people; hence it is significant that no one comes to his aid, and he has to make his own way home-wards.

SÜT is perhaps more overtly critical of contemporary Turkish society than BAL, but nonetheless director Kaplanoğlu emphasizes the importance of human beings' relationship to the natural world around them. Selling milk - the natural produce of farm animals - helps to sustain that bond, while writing poetry offers an opportunity for individuals to reflect ontologically on their lives. It is a tribute to Yusuf's strength of character that he continues in both vocations, despite his reversals.

It seems as if the director applies some known rules to make an award winning movie. Some of the scenes are interesting but the total movie is not enough to give a good taste. It is not giving an idea, the analysis of the tredition is coarse. There isn't enough detail to enjoy slow scenes. Still better than the Egg. And finally watching Basak Koklukaya is a ritual. She is gorgeous.