9/10
One of the best film of 2015
21 November 2015
Warning: Spoilers
One can see a large scale banyan tree surrounded by an equal vast, mysterious yet ambiguous milieu. There is a house, in other words, a cottage, and a road, surrounded and guarded by large crops. A rural unnamed village of Colombia, where this simple, very simple things happened once (most probably it is not a contemporary story, because no technological advancement can be seen, even not cellphone, which is indispensable is spite of hard poverty). But obviously it is a universal tale. Stunning, sometime beautiful and sometime just brilliant.

Cinema, after Godard, have seen a great change. Like 'atonality' in music, there are great deal of movies, that are without bold story-line. I think somewhere between this two extremes, lies the successful movies of our age. There are some fragments of story, but the director is more interested to reveal the inner psychology of the characters. (Like Michael Haneke in Amour, or Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Wintersleep.) Undoubtedly, this movie belongs to this category, and even expands its horizon.

There you can see a long, long shot at the very beginning of the movie. A man is coming, merely invisible at first, then camera waits for the person. Suddenly, a large truck passes by, and the screen is filled by poisonous black dust. Well, the director shows us the main cause of the conflict in the plot, (though the story-line is mostly blurred) with his ability to make, or rather ornament his movie with things like that. Then we get an antecedent-consequent phrase like image, boldly the contrast of light and dark. After the huge light, we come into almost an invisible indoor place, where another man laying for his chest problem and his wife and son are suffering from their trauma.

Well, I don't want to go to every scene of the film, that will be meaningless, but I have to say, then, for almost 30 minutes, the director set his film alternatively in four places. They are coming one by one like a Rondo form, and the main themes of the movie unfolds.

There is one scene, where from an open window (which was open almost 12 years after) we can see the green land, almost like a TV screen, camera stays there fully focused, in the soundtrack we can hear the mourning of the man, who will die after sometime. His illness, perhaps creates an unseen and unfeeling bond between the characters of the family who are stranger to each other for a long time. There was only one song, obviously incidental music, a folk song perhaps, with a dissonant yet attractive tune and a lyrics, subtitled by 'Love, written in tears'. That song is hovering my head after seeing the film, though I heard it only one. The fire scene, is the film's one of the most stunning, harsh poetic scene. Suddenly, when they went away from their land, I remembered the Indian Classic "Pather Panchali" with this same emotions and integrity. The best film I've seen in the 21st Kolkata International film festival.

I hope to see it in the top ten 'Sight and Sound' pole of 2015 films.
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