| TIMES AND WINDS (Beº Vakit) (Cert. 15), an everyday story of country folk struggling to make a living, is set in a mountain village in Turkey. For the villagers, the year is punctuated by the seasons, sun and moon, and weather, but, equally, each day is regulated by the five calls to prayer from the minaret. (The Turkish title means “Five Times”).
Universe and faith are givens to these Turks. The teenagers (who do not seem too different from those of our own country) lounge on rocks beyond the village, but stop their conversation when it is a prayer time. To each there is a season, and what we see in this contemporary Muslim community does not appear dissimilar to patterns that emanated from the Jewish hours and the Christian monastic offices.
Florent Herry’s outstanding photography turns the minaret into a pendulum slicing life into five segments according to the sun’s movement. The director, Reha Erdem, links these time sequences to the conflicting emotions of his characters. The “Night” section intriguingly confounds our expectations with daylight. An ageing father berates one son’s farming abilities while doting on the other. This recurring storyline links us to the Prodigal Son, except that the “night” lies not in the elder brother or erring sibling, but in the father.
Erdem depicts without judgement how love can be expressed in such rural communities — by favouritism and beatings — and that this pattern of upbringing is as predictable as night following day.
The film mainly focuses on two boys, Ömer and Yakup, and a girl, Yildiz, all on the edge of puberty, with Oedipal feelings towards their respective parents. They smoke and giggle at livestock copulating, and wonder if that is how human adults also behave. Yakup has a crush on the young village teacher, and is outraged when he catches his father spying on her.
Ömer’s father is the imam, an unsympathetic character. Both youths wish to kill their fathers. Yildiz bitterly resents all the domestic responsibilities that her mother puts on to her. While the children are playful enough with each other at this season of their lives, it is clear that they will turn out little different from their parents.
The film is reminiscent of Olmi’s classic The Tree of Wooden Clogs, which chronicles Italian peasant life of a hundred years ago. Only this new one lacks the lightness that goes alongside the sadness of community life.
The place of prayer in Times and Winds has functional as well as spiritual elements. Like sabbath observance, prayer provides a break from otherwise unremitting workloads and demands on people’s time. But, foremost, prayer acts here as witness to that “other” kind of time that speaks of eternity in our midst (aion in biblical terms) and which, if we are prepared to attend, accompanies the passing of the hours (chronos). As St Augustine put it: we shall rest and we shall see.
On release at selected cinemas.
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