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Review - Kosmos
Reha Erdem has enjoyed success in his native Turkey with Kosmos - winning Best Film and Best Director at the 2009 Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival. This movie also deserves a wider audience. Sermet Yesil is excellent as Battal, a refugee who stumbles headlong through the snowy wastes and comes upon a small mountain town in Bulgaria, somewhere near the Turkish border. As he arrives, a small boy has drowned and his body is floating down the icy river that runs through the main centre, pursued on the opposite bank by his distraught sister (Turku Turan). The stranger has powers of healing, and manages to revive the boy, and so a circular motion of events begins. At first he is welcomed into the community as a prophet and a healer, but despite his parables and miracles, the townsfolk's sense of mistrust grows when Battal is unable to operate on a worldy level, to hold down a job or pay for tea and sugar.
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Battal operates outside the sphere of ordinary mortals, but his free
spirit is matched by the boy's sister. There is a joyous and animalistic courtship, in which he
announces his name as "Kosmos", and she replies "Neptun". But
her
father (Hakan Altuntas) forbids them from meeting, even stubbing a
cigar out on Kosmos' hand, which heals itself. We discover that Kosmos'
powers
will not work on everyone, just the innocent and those who have faith
and this further isolates him until he has few followers in the town.
There
are obvious religious similarities as Kosmos steals from the rich to
give to the poor, but as well as delving into the role of faith,
Erdem is keen to include other themes that have helped to shape mankind
over the centuries. These include enlightenment (the villagers need to
decide whether to allow the border to come down to allow free trade
that may benefit the
village), morals (the village is proud of its lack of crime but lacks
free will), politics (the fall of communism seems imminent), and
economics
(the bitter winter is forcing them to
slaughter their domestic animals).
These themes are the framework in which love, trust and innocence
might flourish, as personified by Kosmos. The
town looks fantastic - exactly how the Transylvanian village should
have
looked in the Hammer films. The relationships between the characters
could have been
explored more deeply, but Erdem prefers to show how we are at the mercy
of a complex and imperfect world and the best we can do is keep the
faith as we try to make some sense of it. Perhaps, when a rocket lands
near the village, further illustrating the tenuous grip that mankind
retains on his earthly stewardship, Erdem is in danger of over-egging
the pudding, but this is brave, ambitious film-making.
9/10 Memorable
Review written by John Franklin : November 2010
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