Image from Once Upon a Time ... |
I woke up this morning, still restless after
the movie last night. First of all, I
was looking for the answer to who was the protagonist in the film? The suspect?
Suspect #2? Were there three
protagonists, all of them explored in the seemingly incidental stories told by
the doctor, the chief of police and the prosecutor?
I wanted to find a film list or bulletin board
what people were saying about the introduction to the movie last night. Or to
find one of my old classmates after the movie, but I didn’t see anyone there
and in fact the showing was so poorly attended.
Probably only 20 people there and I didn’t know any of them. I was looking for someone else into whom it
had been drilled about how important the first 2 – 4 minutes of a film is. I
took that concept away from the Biopics Film class with a vengeance. That opening sequence when so much is being
set up is crucial to understanding a film.
In this case, the opening sequence comes to the screen and then the
screen goes black, and the name of the film, the producer and director and the
actors roll by in black and white before the colour of another film sequence
begins. It is that little intro that has
been bothering, no confusing me. The
rest of the film is sub-titled, but not this part of the film, so there must be
enough in that sequence to set up what the director wants us to look for. These questions or ideas go by for me.
Is
the director asking us to explore focus:
The film framing a window and through the opaque glass we can see a
television and hear voices. When that
rack focus takes us to see the faces of the people inside the room, we can see
men, sitting around, eating and drinking.
Is
the director asking us to think about what we consume, how that affects us, and
what is left over to be given to the dogs?
I say this because later in the film we discover that the murder was
precipitated by lips that were too loose during a drinking session.
Is
the director asking us to think about a very small place, germane to the action
of a road film, for in fact we are “on the road” for a significant part of the
film. Think about the sounds of the film
in that sequence – dogs barking and the noise of traffic on a highway passing
the building. At one time we even lose
track of the action as a semi-trailer drives by between us and the window we
are looking through.
Another
question about the film is about the director’s gamble with time. The modern audience is used to a film that is
less than two hours. This film is almost three hours long and we rarely see those shot sequences that are edited until we
see 30 shots in 15 seconds or less. None
of that – we are asked to stay in the moment, think with the characters, pause
while answers to questions are being formulated, watch the face of the
listeners instead of watching those asking the questions. When I know beforehand that a foreign film
will be slow-paced, I think to myself ... I am going to treat this film as
though I am sitting on a train, watching through the window while some country
I have never been to, rolls by. And in
the case of this film, if nothing else happened, I felt as though I had a trip
to Turkey, or at the very least been to a small village in the Anatolian steeps
of Turkey. And when the evening ended, I
wanted to go out to a Turkish restaurant where I could eat and talk about what
I had just seen.
Image from Once Upon a Time ... |
Who can believe all of that is
being set up in the first short sequence of the film? And I have only started talking about this,
but I must end here.
To answer your question,
Rebecca? Should you teach this film next
year? Absolutely. I don’t know if your students can slow down enough to watch
and synthesize a film that takes almost three hours, since in law school they
seem to be asked to read so much at such speed.
Can they slow down to give it their full attention? Or will you see them texting their friends or
doing their assignments on laptops as they watch?
I can say, at the very least ... go rent the
film and see for yourself. It is rich in
the nuances of what happens before crimes are sorted out in a court room. And deliciously, the script is based on a true
story. If you wait until I get there,
perhaps we can spend an exquisite afternoon together in front of your large
movie screen ... and we will go eat Turkish food when it is over.
The post is designed to drive a person crazy, until they break down and rent the film to watch! :) yes... lets watch together, then grab a bite at Meze Meze down the street.
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