Eve Dönüs: Sarikamis 1915

I've just watched The Long Way Home. Just as I expected, seeing this movie was great. It is the first movie that was shouted by Alphan Eşeli. After i watched this movie i can't wait to see the new movies of this young Turkish director.

First of all i can say that this movie is not a war movie. İt is about to survive in the middle of nothing and everything. Seven people which are different social statues, meet in the derelict village somewhere in the east of Anatolia during World War I and something strange things happen. Quiet your own voice down, just follow each man's thought and action throughout the struggle to survive.

First of all, the movie does not concern about how Sarikamis had started or how and why the operation fell apart. It just spots on 8 people whose faiths cross on the way of Sarikamis while this shameful war disaster is happening. It can be seen as a survival movie which is fed by historical events in the last years of Ottoman Empire.

Instead of telling the entire historical story of Sarikamis, movie spots on a micro story and narrates how people suffered from the war. The story mainly focuses on the struggle of these 8 people to survive against the nature. War and its inhuman effects lie all over the background of the big picture. Two Turkish (Ottoman) soldiers who somehow survived from the war disaster reflects human nature and bleakness when the mother nature and the things happen in the war force human mind and physicality. Other characters are more likely the symbols of mankind against nature. They seem away from the war and seem to deal with just the problems coming from the mother nature. However, they have to fight against the invisible punches coming from the reality of war at the same time. In other words, the message is clear: war affects everybody around itself whether you are physically involved or not.

The movie is also successful, if it is considered as a "survival against nature" type movie. hopelessness, death, hunger and struggle for life can be felt to the bone during the movie. The best feature of it is to force audience to ask the question "what would we do, if we were them?" to themselves. The story line grips you to empathize with the characters, especially the soldiers who survived from the war incident.

It should be declared that it is not a pure war movie. It does not have any purpose to emphasize nationalism which can generally be seen in war movies. The story line is so simple and clear to tell what it wants to tell to the audience. There are mainly two main ideas to be reflected: First one is how a mankind can be pathetic and defenseless against mother nature and the second one is that the war forces us to bring the inhuman part of us out.

If you take the fact into account that this is the first movie of the director, I would like to say that we must watch him more closely for his further works.

Alphan Eseli's debut feature is set in the eastern Turkish district of Kars in 1915 in the aftermath of the Battle of Sarıkamis, another ill-fated campaign where a foreign invading force - in this case, the Ottomans, went into Russian territory without adequate preparation against the barren winter and were destroyed as a result. Adumbrating the Nazis' equally fruitless campaign twenty- six years later, the Ottomans' strategy was a clear example of how hubris supplanted reason in military terms.

EVE DÖNÜŞ (THE LONG WAY HOME) doesn't focus at all on the military side of the campaign, but rather centers on eight different characters trying to negotiate their way through a barren landscape in order to discover sanctuary. They include faithful servant Sacı Bey (Uğur Polat), a bourgeois lady Gül (Nergis Öztürk) and her daughter Nihan, and a good-for-nothing bandit (Serdar Orçin) and his maimed sidekick (Şevket Suha Tezel). The film follows their struggles against the landscape as well as their struggles against one another; as with all groups of people thrown together by circumstance, they seldom trust one another.

For film buffs EVE DÖNÜŞ has strong thematic echoes of Charles Frend's SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC (1953), even down to the stiff upper lip of Sacı Bey as he tries to plan the best time for everyone to return safely to the nearest township. As in the earlier film, the eight protagonists are reduced one by one, as the cold and their own self-interest claim their lives; at the end only Gül Hanım and another woman are left.

Hayk Kirakosyan's photography is stunning, with the camera capturing both the beauty and the savagery of the snowy landscapes. Perhaps the only real shortcoming of this film is its narrative, which tends to unfold at a snail's pace: sometimes director Eseli is more preoccupied with visual beauty rather than telling a story. This is no fault in itself, but sometimes the imagery does not really serve the film's thematic purpose, or when does, it seems rather repetitive.