Pandora's box is a very good, yet flat-out difficult, film. No, it's not what you think. This is not a film that is difficult to watch because of some screwed-up sense of logic or trying to make sense of five-minute takes of watching a guy eat ice-cream. Rather, this is difficult in the way it is difficult to think about certain memories or the difficulty of being present in a situation. Yeşim Ustaoğlu's film revolves around three siblings living in Istambul who take care of their ill mother after the latter having suddenly disappeared from her home in the mountains. We see the siblings, and their mother, dealing with the situation, and the inevitable tensions arising between them. One strand of the film is the relationship of a mother and her teenage son, who doesn't really feel at home at his mother's place. Surprisingly, he develops an understanding with his grandmother, who doesn't seem to know who he is.
Ustaoğlu works with understatements and capturing a sense of everyday disorientation. Lots of the scenes are quiet. In this way, she* doesn't place the Alzheimer-afflicted woman in a world of her own, ontologically secluded from everybody else. Instead, Ustaoglu seems to emphasize the ways in which we become estranged from the world in many different ways and that we react differently to many things (one scene: the elderly woman makes an attempt to release herself on the carpet, one of the sisters angrily scolds her brother for laughing). Therefore, this is not really a film about Alzheimer's. It's a film about openness and rejection, grief and memory - about the realization of a shared predicament and a shared future. There are a few unnessecary scenes, the omission of which would have made the film a slightly more cohesive affair (how the son is presented). Ustaoğlu's shares an interest in the ugly-beautiful alleys, ports and apartments of Istambul that Nuri Bilge Ceylan so impressively conjures up in Uzak.
Afterwards, googling, I realized I had seen another one of Ustaoğlu's movies, Journey to the sun.
* Shame on me! Before doing some research, I assumed the director was a man...
No comments:
Post a Comment