I have moved to: www.duluxdreams.wordpress.com: September 2009

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Currently reading...The Inheritors (by William Golding)

Currently watching...Uzak ('Distant')

If ever a film was composed in a minor key, it is this beautiful and poignant movie from the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which floats like a helium balloon above the middling mainstreamers of today. It attains a clarity and simplicity that lesser film-makers could strain every sinew trying to achieve without ever getting anywhere. Uzak is about loneliness and depression, and particularly the kind of depression suffered by men of a certain age who would cut their tongues out rather than admit they are depressed.

Yet the film itself is the opposite of depressing. It is gentle and deeply humane, and even ventures into an arena of delicate visual comedy with a shy adroitness. Watching it is like taking a deep draught of cold, clear water and oxygen.

So what is it about? Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) has made a success of his life as a photographer living in an apartment in Istanbul, which he has furnished with a middle-aged bachelor's fastidiousness. Professionally bored and disillusioned, he is conducting a deeply unsatisfactory affair with a married woman and has been forced to confront the reality of his life choices with the news that his ex-wife is leaving for Canada with her new partner. Mahmut's walls are crammed with books and CDs, but he is hardly ever shown reading or listening to music, he mostly just watches TV, while glumly screening out calls from his family on the answering machine. There are long scenes in which Mahmut just, well, watches TV.

His life is disturbed by the deeply unwelcome arrival of Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), a dopey country-bumpkin of a cousin from the same village that he has left behind. Mahmut has promised his mother that he will let Yusuf stay in his pristine modern flat while he looks for work in the big city. It isn't long before Yusuf is getting on his nerves in a very big way, failing to find work, showing every indication of getting comfortable and permeating the carpet with cigarette smoke and fag ash. The realisation that Yusuf is the nearest thing Mahmut will now ever get to human companionship in the evening of his life is appallingly sad and funny.

Poor Yusuf is lonely too: though naturally communicating this to his prickly and disapproving host is out of the question. There are long scenes in which he does nothing but slope around Istanbul in the biting cold. Ceylan found a day to shoot in which the city is made breathtakingly, serendipitously beautiful in the snow, though forbidding and alienating at the same time.

There are sublimely funny moments. Mahmut watches an arty movie on late-night TV, longing for Yusuf to go to bed, so that he can watch porn instead. But, when Yusuf bumbles back into the front room, he must scramble to switch the filth off and get Tarkovsky back on. When a mouse is caught by one of the sticky strips that houseproud Mahmut has laid out, it is Yusuf who, with a residual sense of decency and a heartbreaking empathy with the poor twitching animal, takes it outside in a plastic bag and tries to despatch it humanely by bashing it against a wall, while Mahmut impassively looks on.

The cleverest sequence comes when Mahmut frostily asks if Yusuf has seen a silver pocket-watch that has gone missing. Yusuf is not so stupid that he does not understand the implied accusation and shrilly asks if Mahmut has not just misplaced it. A close-up then tells us that this is indeed the case, but Mahmut will not admit it to Yusuf: his loneliness, his inability to articulate an apology and his tacit, internal admission of defeated pride are disclosed to us in one effortlessly simple take.

Ceylan has superb compositions with a deep focus of beautifully realised, crystalline detail, particularly his opening, painterly shot of a wintry country landscape through which Yusuf is distantly trudging, as distant as a bird, until his great pudding face looms up, filling our field of vision. The movie is a series of these unhurried sequences, timed and managed to perfection. Uzak is about the distances that open up between us locked away in pride. It is about the past, the present and an unattainable future. Highly recommended *****

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Fly - Run - Hurts - Sleep - Australia

[Cover version]

[Original version]

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Danakil!

The Dankalia region of Ethiopia is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. It is, for the most part, wanting of flora and fauna and presents to the eye alternating scenes of desert flatlands and isolated mountain groups, sometimes interrupted by valleys mottled with thorny acacias. Goats roam in bands cropping the bristly stems of short grasses and kicking up loose dirt into little churning dust storms.

Moving inland, toward the Ethiopian highlands, a long depression extends itself reaching a depth of 120 meters below sea level. This section is one of the lowest and hottest places on earth and is known as Dallol (Danakil depression), where temperatures in the sun can reach 145°F (50°C).

The Danakil depression is an area along the Great Rift Valley (the cradle of mankind) where the earth’s crust is being stretched and thinned like sheets of heated plastic and the land has sunk, over much time, to a current depth of 371 feet below sea level. This is one of the lowest points on earth. Here the earth’s crust is so thin that new land is constantly being created by new lava jets that ooze upward. Water also seeps down, to be ejected back out again as angry steam bursts. Volcanic cones are an enchanting and common visual sight, as are deep cracks that line the earth. To be here is to feel the birth pains of the young earth many billions of years hence.

10,000 years ago the Danakil desert was part of the Red Sea when the earth’s crust collapsed and water flooded in. Many believe this localised geological event to be the origin of the Biblical Noah's flood story. This flood water; subjected for many years to a blazing sun, gradually evaporated leaving behind enormous salt pans and salt lakes. Lakes so salty that the density of the water is greater than the density of the human body - enabling one to float without paddling.

The people living in the Afar region; a crumbling waste of brittle rock and broken lava flows are as tough and hostile as their environment. The Afar people are largely nomads and almost entirely Muslim by faith. It is here that some of the oldest humanoid fossils have been found, linking our ancestral tree's roots, firmly and suredly, in a African setting. A million years back we are all Africans.