THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Kasabathe first feature film never before seen in France by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, takes us back to 1997 and the beginnings of a celebrated, multi-award-winning artist (Palme d’Or in 2014 at Cannes for Winter Sleep), who has become the figurehead of Turkish cinema internationally. Proposed in the wake of Dried herbs, this first attempt will not disorient those who have just discovered his work at the end, as we find there almost the same motifs – a lost village, curled up existences, a background of universal bitterness – but arranged differently. A persistence is revealed at the same time as a course: Ceylan has not stopped digging the same furrow, only the form of its films has changed. The work has taken a monumental slope (no film below three hours since Winter Sleep), When Kasaba spent itself in dreamy puffs, impossible to engrave in marble.
We will not be surprised to find remote Anatolia as the setting for this inaugural work. Kasaba designates the small town where, in the 1970s, a story of childhood takes place (inspired by the memories of the filmmaker and his sister Emine Ceylan) in three seasonal episodes. The first is winter. In a classroom surrounded by snow and cold outside, while the teacher makes the students recite edifying texts on family and homeland, a bad smell spreads: it comes from the gamy snack of little Asiye (Havva Saglam ), who must get rid of it, humiliated, in front of her comrades.
Comes spring. We find the latter frolicking on the edge of the village, in a wood, with her little brother Ali (Cihat Bütün). The two children venture into a cemetery where the slightest event takes on a disturbing tone: a donkey, shaking itself in the neighboring enclosure, then a cloud, piling up above their heads, suddenly pushing them to scurry away. Past a field of corn, they join their parents and grandparents, gathered around a campfire, where the cobs are roasted.
Childhood cruelty
From children, we then move on to adults, through a long conversation sinking into the night, which contains the heart of the film. What we are talking about intersects with the great Ceylonian question: the insoluble tension between here and elsewhere, between the village and the world.
The grandfather (Mehmet Emin Ceylan), who was in the war, led a long campaign to Iraq, and his eldest (Sercihan Alioglu), studying engineering in the United States, ended up returning home. But the nephew, Saffet (Mehmet Emin Toprak), an enraged young man crossed by an oceanic feeling, feels too cramped in the village insularity, but not quite capable of tearing himself away from these places.
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