In a unidentified snowbound place without a sense of time passing, there is a obvious Narnian magic from the start. First, we encounter a man (Sermet Yesil) falling over himself with joy (or anxiety?!) as he enters its hilly outer reaches, and soon sees below him towers, a river and rooftops. A girl on the river-bank (Neptün, as she comes to be named (Türkü Turan)), wails in grief because her brother has fallen into the ceaseless water. The man, Kosmos (as he calls himself), bravely rescues him, and, with exhausting bear-hugs, breathes life into him.
Later, we see Kosmos praying alone in a large sanctuary, being thanked by the boy’s father and seeming awkward, although never awkward to accept tea (and massive amounts of sugar) on the house. He is a visitor, a guest, welcomed for words from sources such as the Book of Ecclesiastes, even if his meaning may not be clear. However, when given work in the café, he wanders off, ignores his duties in favour of generally humane causes, and does what he thinks fit to the situation.
I do like him, and value his other-worldliness, but I do not know if we need to. We needn’t approve his errors either: the human misunderstanding of mistaking sex for love, or feeling compassion and consequently offering someone a way out. Kosmos should be a puzzle, a prompt to think about this world and where everyone is in their relations, but in a gentle, non-didactic way. This is non-commercial filmmaking, and it does not preach, but leaves us to find our way without rushing itself or us.
I therefore disagree with what is quoted in IMDb’s Google entry, as ‘A Plodding Art-House Misfire’ (the rating there is 7.2), and would recommend ‘this bizarre, magical and rather weird film’, the kind of film that gets five Torches of Truth from me, I’m afraid.
Anthony has awarded Kosmos five Torches of Truth.
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This is a weird film. It isn’t what you expect, the main character seems to go from one person to the next and heals them, maybe or maybe not! He may be making them worse or may be doing nothing at all, who knows?
Ok, the bit that stuck with me, and I just knew it was coming, was the pain in the cow’s eye as it was being ritually slaughtered, you could see the pain in close-up, so no-one tell me that ritual slaughter doesn’t hurt, barbaric!
I am not sure what the director was trying to convey in that scene, was it sympathy for the cows or something else, again, who knows?
It has left me feeling anger for our system allowing ritual slaughter to be legal in this country for the sake of medieval religious dogma.
I entirely agree with you that we do not know what to make of the man who calls himself ‘Kosmos’, and, for that matter, of the abattoir, or of the strange streaks that pass across the screen with electronic noises from time to time (maybe something to do with what falls to earth).
As to the slaughter methods in Halal (or, for that matter, Kosher) butchery, I know nothing about them, or their origins (mediaeval or otherwise)…