Every year about this time, the Seattle International Film Festival pretty much takes over cinephilic Seattle for a month or so. This year's festival runs May 19–June 12.Although the festival proper doesn't begin until the 19th, advance press screenings of selected festival entries began yesterday. And since my Full Series Pass allows me to attend those as well, I managed to sit in on two of yesterday's three press-preview films: Miranda July's The Future and Reha Erdem's Turkish/Bulgarian Kosmos.
So here's the first in an unknown number of bloggish posts on screenings I attend at this year's SIFF.
Kosmos
Turkey/Bulgaria, 2009 (122 minutes)
Director: Reha Erdem
Cast: Sermet Yesil, Türkü Turan, Hakan Altuntas
Awards: Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival 2009 (Best Film, Director, Cinematography)
Official website
IMDb
SIFF's page
Press blurb:
In this hauntingly beautiful imagining of a mysterious universe, a strange man drifts into a remote snowbound town and disrupts the existence of its inhabitants after rescuing a drowning boy.
In interesting ways, Kosmos tracks like something out of Kafka. From out of the distance in a vast snowy wasteland, a half-crazed, wild-eyed man (Sermet Yeşil) appears. He seems to be running from somebody or something. In his hand is a wad of cash. Is he a thief (it turns out that he is), and if so, whose money is it? He encounters a village, but before seeking refuge there he saves a drowning boy by fishing him from a rushing river and (apparently) bringing his dead body back to life. For this act the village welcomes him as a special guest.
He speaks sparingly, and then only in biblical crypticisms, and seems to neither sleep nor eat (except for the bowls of sugar lumps at the tavern that has taken him in). He can scale trees as if gravity is a concept that need not concern him. It isn't long before the locals see him as a dervish sent from God. Indeed, other miraculous events at his hands, as well as a rash of robberies in this place that purports to know no crime, upset the townspeople and their village's timeless ... well, not order, exactly. The village shares a border with a nameless enemy, and the constant sound of artillery fire becomes part of the film's moody, effective landscape.The mysterious stranger tells the people that what he is looking for is love, which he finds in the lovely, raven-haired sister of the boy he saved from drowning. He brings out a nearly feral wildness in her, and together they share a communication of sorts by imitating the eerie, keening calls of birds.
There's some sedate pacing and blunt-object allegorizing (wild dogs red in tooth and claw, cattle in the abattoir, the stranger as a Christ-like figure etc.), plus a jumble of curious elements — the woman from the train, the boy with the illness, the wall-climbing, the chunk of machinery (a rocket? a weapon from the across the border? a spaceship dispatched to take the stranger home or deliver his mail?) that lands like a meteor in the wastes near the village — and I suspect some Bulgarian/Turkish cultural references I'm ill-equipped to decipher or even recognize for what they are.
Nonetheless, the film is gorgeous to look at and listen to (the musical scoring is striking) and peculiar in a curiosity-piquing way that keeps it engaging enough until the stranger (who reveals to the girl that his name is Kosmos) returns running, again a fugitive, to the snowy wilds from whence he came, perhaps (I wonder) to repeat the story again in another village on the other side of all that white.
Near at hand: Miniature kaleidoscope
