Director Levent Semerci’s debut feature, the war drama ‘Nefes’ (Breath) puts a halt to all the desperate attempts to put the film in a nationalistic or anti-military category. The teasers and the constant delay of the release date might have fueled debates before it met audiences, but the beautifully shot film featuring unknown actors successfully refrains from making any statements, instead remaining a haunting slice-of-life film about soldiers
Heated debates preceded the release of director Levent Semerci’s war drama Nefes (Breath) in chat rooms, Web forums, Facebook groups and mass media.
Thanks to cleverly edited teasers that barely gave any clue to the movie, a constant delay of the release date over the last six months and a nation overly sensitive to war, civil-military relations and nationalism, the public has plenty of ammunition for it’s verbal battles.
Ironically, the release of advertisement director Semerci’s debut film put a halt to many of the discussions because the audience had a hard time pinning down the message of the movie and labeling it as positive or negative propaganda for the military.
The film follows the lives of a small troop in a remote alpine relay station in Southeast Turkey on the border of Iraq in 1993, when the guerilla war between Turkey and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, was at its worst and claiming lives regularly in the vast mountains at the border. Nefes begins with the aftermath of an engagement that claimed the lives of two soldiers in the platoon.
We meet the young soldiers and the commander in a long and tense scene in which the captain motivates/scares his troops with a speech that borders somewhere between angry and sociopathic. The speech ends with famous words from the teasers: “You die if you sleep.” We get to know the handful of soldiers as they try to cope with a lonely existence, and the sad acceptance of an unknown enemy in a place cut off from everything they know. Semerci’s selection of unknown names from acting schools around the country proves to be the right choice as no one character stands out, and it helps to amplify the sense of voyeurism into the lives of a real group of soldiers.
Stuck between moments of hope and despair
For the Turkish audience, the experience of watching the everyday lives of these soldiers becomes more haunting as these border stations are the epitome of the lives of thousands claimed in the last two decades, and most people don’t have a clue what they look like or what it feels like to be on the edges of a country.
The film moves toward a climactic engagement between the troops and guerilla soldiers of the terrorist known as the Doctor, a med-student-turned-terrorist, hence the name. The only moments of hope and happiness for the soldiers are when they’re singing along to an impersonation of a singer, when watching a football match and when they manage the arduous task of placing calls to girlfriends, fiancés and mothers. These calls naturally turn into moments of despair when girlfriends break up with them and when mothers weep.
The unprecedented success of Nefes lies in its ability to put a stop to all desperate attempts to maneuver the film into a nationalistic or anti-military stance. The film strategically moves away from putting forward any message, and simply tells the stories of young men at war. It’s easy to interpret the movie in any way, depending on your take on the war. Semerci simply captures a group of scared young men ready to accept death because it’s the easiest option or, if they’re lucky, about to become damaged goods, scarred for life.
Semerci moves his camera skillfully, slowly and with confidence across the skies, naked mountains, and a few soldiers lost along the depressing landscape. Most of the time, the scenes of stillness are enough to give the sense of loneliness, despair and meaninglessness of war. And when the movie moves into crafty and realistic scenes of military engagement, it refuses to stay a mix of detached action scenes but turn into tales of horror for everyone touched by war.
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