Nuvole di maggio

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.

Don't expect to find models or playboys in this movie. Nor expect people to hate or harm each other. There is not too much philosophical extravaganza either. No sex, no violence, no big words. So what made this movie to win so many awards in Turkey and elsewhere? "Mayis Sikintisi" (The Anxiety of May) is just about the simple and beautiful flow of daily life. Some commentators called it "a pastoral symphony". It has only a "slight narrative"; the story of the director himself, his own family and how he shot his first feature film "Kasaba" in his own native town. If you like the style of the contemporary Iranian cinema, especially that of Abbas Kirostami and Jaffar Panahi, you will surely like this movie. Watch "Mayis Sikintisi" and you will feel your mind and soul purified!

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.

This film will not go down in film history annals as another Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai, but I have no doubt that scattered connoisseurs will still be watching this film long after most big-time Hollywood watermelons meet their deserved oblivion. This is a quiet, unpretentious film that manages, with the sparsest materials, to wind its way into your heart and mind forever. A film director returns to his provincial home town to shoot a film with amateurs (his parents and friends) as the stars. This is therefore a "metafilm," or a film within a film. The director doesn't make a big deal out of this minor post-modern conceit, he doesn't wear his learning on his sleeve--he just uses it as a source of humor and self-deprecation. The pivot of the film is the director's relationship with his father, a stubborn yet gentle idealist who simply wants to keep his modest grove, which he has tended for over fifty years, from being cut down by the land authorities. The ties between parents and children, the forces of encroaching modernity, the paradoxical beauty and desperation of provincial life, and man's ties to nature are all themes the director handles with deft, light touches. The story is reminiscent of Chekhov (to whom the film is dedicated) and the Iranian masters, but at the same time seems very plain and artless. There are, however, deep springs of art behind that seeming artlessness, "unheard melodies" that only time and repeated viewing can fully drag into the consciousness of the average viewer: but they are there, and they soar.

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.