After watching a three hour Turkish movie that won the Palm d' Or at the Cannes Film Festival (the equivalent of winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in Hollywood), I was struck by its universality; an expression of a thread that runs through the human family called "confused love."
Although the film is set in the stunning landscape of Cappadocia, (the Anatolian region of Turkey), thus giving an exotic air to the ambiance, the actual drama could be played out in any small town. Pick a small village in an isolated part of a country, far away from an urban center, and you can find the kind of maddening, incestuous, and frustrating atmosphere where a fishbowl of human emotions lies in stark magnification.
The dynamics are as old as those hills: ancestral ties uprooted, poverty vs. wealth, young wife versus older man, debauched drunks with long-suffering wives and children, frustrated artists whose stage lights have long been extinguished, couples torn apart by lust or death, and so and and so forth.
The tapestry of characters form a human drama of intricate proportions and we know them, whether they be in the hobbit houses of Cappadocia or are laid forth as stories of family dysfunction in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.
It is at once gratifying to know that us humans are bound together in a common thread no matter where the culture, and at the same time horrifying to see how love becomes perverted and twisted into lives of misery. The promise denied, the yearning repressed.
And it is all so unecessary; this drama, this pain. The underlying drive is to be seen, to be heard, to be loved, to be appreciated. If only people could learn to communicate from the heart and learn not to fear authenticity - to break free of the ignorance of egotistical drives. What a wonderful world it would be.
Although the film is set in the stunning landscape of Cappadocia, (the Anatolian region of Turkey), thus giving an exotic air to the ambiance, the actual drama could be played out in any small town. Pick a small village in an isolated part of a country, far away from an urban center, and you can find the kind of maddening, incestuous, and frustrating atmosphere where a fishbowl of human emotions lies in stark magnification.
The dynamics are as old as those hills: ancestral ties uprooted, poverty vs. wealth, young wife versus older man, debauched drunks with long-suffering wives and children, frustrated artists whose stage lights have long been extinguished, couples torn apart by lust or death, and so and and so forth.
The tapestry of characters form a human drama of intricate proportions and we know them, whether they be in the hobbit houses of Cappadocia or are laid forth as stories of family dysfunction in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.
It is at once gratifying to know that us humans are bound together in a common thread no matter where the culture, and at the same time horrifying to see how love becomes perverted and twisted into lives of misery. The promise denied, the yearning repressed.
And it is all so unecessary; this drama, this pain. The underlying drive is to be seen, to be heard, to be loved, to be appreciated. If only people could learn to communicate from the heart and learn not to fear authenticity - to break free of the ignorance of egotistical drives. What a wonderful world it would be.
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