Honey (2010)

Honey is the third film in Semih Kaplanöglu's brilliant childhood trilogy that starts with a middle aged poet and ends with a curious little boy. Visually, this is a stunning effort; the camera instantaneously not only establishes glorious-looking rural landscapes - a fictional world is quickly established - a sensually heightened world at that: the birds are chirping, the wind is breezing in the trees. It's strange how the film balances a contemplatively dreamy tone with ordinariness. With regards to the dreaminess, I come to think of the Spanish directors Carlo Saura and Victor Erice - they share the attention to the child's perception and exploration of the world s/he has at hand, a world that is often disconcerting. The resemblance to these Spanish directors is hard to forget when I watch the camera saunter around in the family house, a dimly lit place, a place of shadows and light.

In this case, the six-year old child is worried about his father, a beekeeper, who has disappeared. We see the boy's close, tender relationship with his father; they share a way of talking, a way of being silent, a way of putting shoes on. It is startling and rare to see this kind of quiet intimacy. He is angry with his mother, who tries to comfort him. He walks alone in the woods. At school, he wants to be the boy who earns the Star for excellent performance in reading. But he is not very good. The kid stammers, and through his stammering presence, the grief is almost too much too see. Kaplanöglu works with scenes and rhythm, rather than narrative. His films - the trilogy which I have seen - have a placid pacing which also sometimes harbors ruptures and abrupt cuts. But the feel of the images come first; the progression from one thing to another is poetic, rather than conventionally 'rational'. He is not, I think, a director who seeks to impress his viewer, suffocating us in stunning beauty. The aesthetics of Honey is starkly rooted in everyday life. For this reason, the way he focuses on nature never gets clichéd; the film sticks closely to the kid's perspective, his exploration, his fears. One example of this is when the kid sneaks out on a nightly walk to look at the rain. These are, for me, completely engrossing scenes.

I'd like to watch this film again - I am sure I will be able to make out new dimensions and appreciate new things in the rich images if I watch it a second time.