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FILMS Turkey / Bulgaria

Erdem creates enchantingly bizarre world in Kosmos

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One of Turkey’s most versatile directors, Reha Erdem, returns after My Only Sunshine with an even more demanding but also more engaging and impressive story, Kosmos [+see also:
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, about a hobo, thief and shaman of the same name, which screened at the Sarajevo Film Festival (July 23-31).

The film is bookended by a long shot of snowy landscape in which a lone figure respectively advances and moves away from us. This is the Kosmos (an amazing Sermet Yesil, who debuted in Erdem’s A Run for Money in 1999), who arrives in a small Turkish town, clearly somewhere on the border with Russia, judging by the architecture (the film was shot in Kars).

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As he approaches a river, he hears the scream of a young woman (a beautiful and engaging Turku Turan, in her feature debut). Her little brother has been pulled down the fast stream and Kosmos jumps in and saves him, apparently reviving him by shaking him in his arms and howling into the freezing air.

News of the miracle reaches town and Kosmos is hailed as a saviour. Yet he is a strange character whose Zen-like talk about life and the universe no one comprehends. But Kosmos doesn’t seem to care. He communicates with the boy’s sister through a form of dog-like howling. He falls in love, and their yelping conversations are somehow simultaneously annoying and strangely uplifting.

When he isn’t healing various ailing characters, all of them weird and illustrious in their own, special ways, Kosmos runs around town looting shops for money, although he practically doesn’t use any of it. Though it turns out there is always someone who can use it, whether he gives it to them or they steal it away. He is also able to defy gravity because, as he says, “Gravity is the love in our hearts.”

The most technically interesting aspect of the film is the sound design, for which Erdem won the Special Jury Award at Antalya, along with Best Cinematography, Best Director and Best Film. The story obviously takes place today, as proven by modern Visa and Master Card ads on shop doors, but in the distance we keep hearing sounds of cannons, missiles and machine guns. The town is also under some kind of siege, with the army controlling the situation.

However, since there is currently no war along Turkey’s borders, and hasn’t been for a long time, we are led to believe that the story takes place in some metaphysical place beyond space and time. The setting seems conceived to provide someone like Kosmos a place to exist. With elements of Jesus, Robin Hood and Yoda, he is one of the most singular, original and interesting figures to appear on the screen in a long time.

And in building an enchanting, darkly bizarre and simultaneously optimistic atmosphere around his character, Erdem positions himself as the most authentic auteurs of modern Turkish cinema. Maybe even too authentic, judging by the lack of festival recognition for this amazingly baffling piece of art.

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