Cinema that sears....
The only sensation one is left with after watching the movie Turtles Can Fly, directed by Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, is a stunned numbness, the kind one might feel after being hit unawares. The senses take time to recover and the pain comes in slowly. And it stays. Because the blow the film has delivered is invisible and noiseless, and thus, deeper.
Like most Iranian films, this a story told through the lives of children, most of them orphans, caught in Kurdish refugee camps on the Iraq-Turkey border. An impending US invasion on Iraq and the subsequent fall of Saddam Hussein looms large in the backdrop.
But Ghobadi is more interested in the consequences rather than causes. So, politics and history lurk in the background while their young, innocent victims fill the foreground, bearing physical and psychological evidence of destruction in the deformities and disabilities they carry.
But the treatment of the fact disturbs more than the fact. It's all treated like a normality, with humour and common banter accentuating a tragedy that's taken for granted. Ghobadi never once thumps the brutality of the human crisis in your face, but conveys the everyday-ness of the horror through casual conversations between characters, passing references in speech and sometimes, just blank stares in the children's eyes.
Soran, nicknamed Satellite (because he installs satellite dishes in the neighbourhood and translates war-related news to the refugees) is the adolescent leader, who has taken it upon himself to provide employment to the children by selling the mines they collect in the arm's market. He goes about his business as usual, hoping that the Americans will change things for the better, till Agrin and her armless, clairvoyant brother Henkov arrive in the camp with a blind child. Satellite is drawn to the girl and the horror of her personal past (she was raped as a minor by Iraqi soldiers who forced them out of their village; the child is her baby) echoes in the country's equally bleak future. By the time she kills herself and her baby, Saddam has fallen and the Americans have arrived promising a dreamland. But Satellite, now trusting the ancient wisdom of Hengov's doom-predicting prophecies more than the optimistic news broadcast through modern, Western technology, knows better. The last shot of the film is a blank frame, divested of all hope, a silent landscape hanging in fragile balance. It, quite aptly, leaves you speechless.
Though the film is a strong statement on the horrors of war, there are no loud moments of violence (except a dream-like...rather, nightmarish scene of torture), no dramatised tensions, no staggering climax. Yet, the impact is devastating. That is where the frightening beauty of Ghobadi's art lies...that, the understatement overwhelms, and the simply-told reality screams such complex, pressing issues of our times. If a whole generation of children are facing such atrocities of war as a way of life, we need to reconsider our faith in the sentience of the human race.
Like most Iranian films, this a story told through the lives of children, most of them orphans, caught in Kurdish refugee camps on the Iraq-Turkey border. An impending US invasion on Iraq and the subsequent fall of Saddam Hussein looms large in the backdrop.
But Ghobadi is more interested in the consequences rather than causes. So, politics and history lurk in the background while their young, innocent victims fill the foreground, bearing physical and psychological evidence of destruction in the deformities and disabilities they carry.
But the treatment of the fact disturbs more than the fact. It's all treated like a normality, with humour and common banter accentuating a tragedy that's taken for granted. Ghobadi never once thumps the brutality of the human crisis in your face, but conveys the everyday-ness of the horror through casual conversations between characters, passing references in speech and sometimes, just blank stares in the children's eyes.
Soran, nicknamed Satellite (because he installs satellite dishes in the neighbourhood and translates war-related news to the refugees) is the adolescent leader, who has taken it upon himself to provide employment to the children by selling the mines they collect in the arm's market. He goes about his business as usual, hoping that the Americans will change things for the better, till Agrin and her armless, clairvoyant brother Henkov arrive in the camp with a blind child. Satellite is drawn to the girl and the horror of her personal past (she was raped as a minor by Iraqi soldiers who forced them out of their village; the child is her baby) echoes in the country's equally bleak future. By the time she kills herself and her baby, Saddam has fallen and the Americans have arrived promising a dreamland. But Satellite, now trusting the ancient wisdom of Hengov's doom-predicting prophecies more than the optimistic news broadcast through modern, Western technology, knows better. The last shot of the film is a blank frame, divested of all hope, a silent landscape hanging in fragile balance. It, quite aptly, leaves you speechless.
Though the film is a strong statement on the horrors of war, there are no loud moments of violence (except a dream-like...rather, nightmarish scene of torture), no dramatised tensions, no staggering climax. Yet, the impact is devastating. That is where the frightening beauty of Ghobadi's art lies...that, the understatement overwhelms, and the simply-told reality screams such complex, pressing issues of our times. If a whole generation of children are facing such atrocities of war as a way of life, we need to reconsider our faith in the sentience of the human race.
posted by renu at 12:10 AM
2 Comments:
Renu!
I found your blog again, and I shall read, very faithfully and diligently as from now on.
Thanks so much for this post. I'll add Turtles Can Fly to my must-see list now. There's something about subtlety, about things said without being said, which is peculiar of Irani cinema. And what I like about your "review" of the film is that it translates that subtlety of sorts.
Ah, it's such a pleasure to read you after so long, and that too, Renu on cinema :)
renu..tell me one thing..are these films available newhere??
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