Cinema
Brutalities
Peter Ackroyd
Vol ('15', Lumiere Cinema, St Martin's Lane)
Some of the critical success of this film seems to have come from the personal circumstances of its director: Yilmaz Gilney was until recently a prisoner in a Turkish jail. He was serving a sentence for a murder which, so we are told, he did not commit and from his cell he superintended the mak- ing of this film — he called the shots, as it were. How he was able to do so remains a mystery to me — did he use carrier pigeons, or bang on his bars in some kind of code? It does not matter now, however, since he managed to escape to Switzerland and in liberty completed the editing and produc- tion.
It is an odd story, which raises more questions than there are available answers, but it has provided a 'talking point'. It might also seem to guarantee a certain amount of authenticity to Yol itself, which opens in a Turkish prison. The story con- cerns five inmates who are released for one week so that they can visit their relatives; they travel to various areas of Turkey, where they quickly discover that life 'out- side' is no less' harsh and restrictive than that in prison. One man finds that in his absence his wife has become a prostitute, and is under an unofficial sentence of death from his family, while another returns to his Kurdish village which is being besieged by Turkish forces. And so it goes on, inci- dent after incident elucidating the central theme that Turkey has a patriarchal and brutalising culture (of which the current military repression is only one aspect).
That sounds very good — we are all quite willing to believe the worst about any other country — but the only trouble is that Yol is so obviously "about' such matters that it forfeits anything other than polemical in- terest. Scenes have been so obviously set up to make a point, and that point is so in- sistently emphasised, that we get something which under other circumstances would be labelled as crude propaganda. Throughout the film there is a characteristic inability to create a plausible sense of human personali- ty, and we have instead a form of melodrama in which characters are effaced by the broad brush of political -and social comment.
It may be that we should not expect, in Turkish films, the same attention to realistic characterisation that is evident in Western films; the point is arguable, but even on a technical level Yol seems maladroit. It must, of course, be difficult to direct a film from a prison cell, and yet Mr Guney seems to have been happy enough with the film to send it into the world, and so he must take the consequences. The camera here seems to have been used with the same laboured monotony as a tribesman beating a drum, there are some pedestrian 'cut-ins' to suggest remembered events, and some unwieldy symbolism — a bird in a cage represents the loss of freedom, and so on — which would no longer be acceptable even in pantomime. This heavy-handed quality is emphasised by the dialogue. Since I do not speak Turkish, I relied upon the sub-titles: 'Fear reigns in every heart and home', 'I'm torn between pity and hatred'; a young woman has been chained in a shed for eight months, unable to wash, living off bread and water. What does she say when she sees her husband after their long separation? 'It's no use cry- ing over spilt milk.' Enough said.
If Yol has any value at all, it must be as a documentary. The seediness and the dirti- ness of the country have to be seen to be believed; if, that is, it can be believed: I am suspicious of films which present so barren and monotonous a view of a civilisation as old as Turkey. The major burden of the film concerns the plight of women, which is indeed horrific: they are scorned, brutalis- ed, and assaulted by men who reserve their affection for each other. But that sexual violence is, on the evidence of this film, on- ly one aspect of the pervasive brutality of Turkish life. This bleak view may be one reason why Mr Gurley has now been strip- ped of his citizenship, although the ostensi- ble cause seems to have been his opposition to the military government. However, the army in this film seems altogether a minor blemish in a country that is already full of wounds.
Why, then, did Yol receive a Golden Palm award at Cannes? Most of the prizes at Cannes are a standing joke, in any event, but I suspect that in this case it was a kind of po-faced reverence for a director who has been a prisoner and is also a victim of dictatorship. I am not attacking the prin- ciples involved, I am only suggesting that they do not guarantee excellence or even veracity. Good intentions do not make good films.
Actually, I am not sure that the inten- tions here are wholly good. Although Guney seems to be engaged in a full-scale attack upon all aspects of Turkish life, there seems to be an element of bluff, or in- sincerity, involved in this frontal assault. The film has been described as 'heroic', although the only available heroes would be the prisoners themselves — murderers, thieves or whatever (the exact nature of their offences is never made clear) who seem to accept, albeit in a sullen manner, the ways of their country. The idea that Giiney has some other, authorial, perspec- tive is not really tenable: it would demand a subtlety of which the film seems incapable on any level. The brutality and horror of the events portrayed here are, I think, employed for sensationalist purposes; they are, if anything, only a cover for what is really a loud raspberry directed at the Turkish authorities.
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