Semih Kaplanoğlu has been easing his way into Turkey’s popular consciousness over the last decade. He’s now become a revered name, the proud winner of the Golden Bear at the recent Berlin International Film Festival. His first two feature films, Herkes Kendi Evinde (Away from Home) of 2001 and second film Meleğin Düşüşü (Angel’s Fall) of 2005 had won him various awards here and abroad.
However, it was his last three films, making Yusuf’s trilogy, that put him on the radar for many movie buffs in Turkey. The bizarre name of the first one, Yumurta (Egg), raised our interest. Then, we learned that the subsequent two films in the trilogy would make up a shopping list, Süt (Milk) and Bal (Honey).
Yusuf is the protagonist in all three films, and the trilogy plays backward. The films tell the story of a young man, a teenager, and a little boy respectively. The final film, the Golden Bear winner, Bal is in theaters now. And having watched the three films, we realize that the stories don’t necessarily belong to the same person, even though they share their first names.
It all began with an ‘Egg’
Yumurta, the top contender at the 2007 Golden Orange festival, sweeping six awards including Best Film and Screenplay, was about a young man lost in a big city. In the movie, the popular heartthrob Nejat İşler plays Yusuf, a poet and owner of a secondhand bookstore in Istanbul. He goes back to his small hometown upon his mother’s death. The journey triggers his sense of isolation, not belonging neither to his hometown nor his newfound home in Istanbul. Yusuf realizes that the place where he grew up is both a source of alienation and a source of peace for him.
Süt similarly featured a young man’s struggle to find his place in the changing face of rural and urban lives and traditional roles of masculinity. Melih Selçuk played a younger Yusuf in the movie, which was more of a coming-of-age story, telling the story of how Yusuf parts from his town and his mother. Yusuf’s problematic relationship with his mother had a heightened effect with Başak Köklükaya’s haunting performance as the mother and a more confident Kaplanoğlu behind the camera. The film won the FIPRESCI prize in last year’s Istanbul International Film Festival and was nominated for the Golden Lion in Venice.
Bal takes us to Yusuf’s childhood. Interestingly, the film doesn’t necessarily play as a prequel to the first two films. Kaplanoğlu plays with time, and places the story in contemporary Turkey. The sense of time and place is deliberately distorted as dream sequences converge with reality in Little Yusuf’s story.
Süt had focused on the complicated relationship between a child and his mother. Bal is the story of a child and his father. When Yusuf begins school, he goes through a trauma of being introduced to a whole new system for the first time. He refuses to talk, dreams becoming his only way to communicate, especially with his father. Here, we get to see how the seeds of Yusuf’s dysfunctional relationship with women and his mother in the previous films were planted.
A difficult journey for Yusuf and the audience
Kaplanoğlu said he didn’t want to make a surreal film and doesn’t like his films to be interpreted through symbolism. Unfortunately for him, the film with minimal dialogue is abundant with symbols and metaphors. Even the titles Egg and Milk are enough to open discussions on symbolism. On another note on symbolism, Yusuf’s father’s name is Yakup. That’s Joseph and Jacob in Turkish. Biblical Jospeh was Jacob’s son and he was blessed with interpreting dreams. The references might not be on a grand scale but they’re still there.
Like the previous two films in the trilogy, Bal is a simple, minimalist and touching film, reminiscent of European masters like Bergman and Bresson. In all of the films, it’s never an easy journey for Yusuf and neither for the audience. And in Bal, there’s too much on the shoulders of the 7-year-old actor Bora Altaş, but he proves to be one of the best newcomers this year.
Similar to his protagonist Yusuf, director and writer Semih Kaplanoğlu moved to Istanbul in his early 20s. Having studied cinema and television in İzmir, he later worked in renowned advertising agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi and Young & Rubicam as a copywriter. He became an assistant cameraman for two award-winning documentaries, and later wrote and directed various episodes of the popular TV series, Şehnaz Tango in the 90s.
Kaplanoğlu wrote articles on cinema and plastic arts for nearly two decades, and had a column in the daily Radikal between 1996 and 2000. After the national and international success of his two feature films, Herkes Kendi Evinde and Meleğin Düşüşü, Kaplanoğlu founded his own film production company, Kaplan Films. Yumurta was the first feature film for Kaplan Films. As is the custom with most Turkish directors, he writes, directs, produces, and at times, edits his films.
Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News on 17 April 2010
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