Turkish cinema, we are told, is the new rock n’ roll and watching Reha Erdem’s fourth feature we are given little cause to doubt it. At first glance, Times and Winds looks like a stately, though standardised European arthouse product. Exotic locale? Check. Coming of age story? Check. Elegant brushstrokes and weighty apparent influences like Abbas Kiarostami? Check. Haunting Arvo Part score? That’s a big check.
Things are not, however, what they seem. Times and Winds is a first class mind-fuck, one sneaky, subversive picture. By the time you’ve realised that the filmmaker is poking about in parts of your psyche that ought not to be poked, it’s too late; you’re already hooked on the soapy drama and discombobulating tangents.
Set in a remote mountain village in northern Turkey, this good looking film follows three pre-teens as they struggle with harsh circumstances and the complications of adolescence. Their bucolic surroundings and occasional frolics mask their tremendous, though impotent rage against a terrifying, oppressive patriarchal order. Omer spends his days dreaming up ways to kill his father, a local imam who wastes no opportunity to remind the boy of his worthlessness. His friend Yakup, a kid with his own domestic problems, pines for his lovely, single school teacher until he discovers he’s not alone in his adoration. Yildiz, as a girl, is the unluckiest of all, condemned to babysit her baby brother until she has offspring (preferably sons) of her own.
The director makes their various Oedipal nightmares all the more powerful by inserting enigmatic shots of the children as corpses. It’s freaky. It’s painful. It’s not far from the dangerous psychological geography explored by Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s superb Innocence. And yet you find yourself wanting to walk right back into the cinema to watch it all over again. If Turkish cinemas is indeed the new rock n’ roll, this might just be The Stooges’ Fun House.