The whole of the moon

Since it looked like the harvest moon was going to be another no-show this year, the GWO and I didn't make any special plans. Quite the opposite, in fact: We decided to clear some leftovers out of the fridge in anticipation of some big cooking on Saturday. But after a day of storms, the skies unexpectedly cleared and I found myself rushing through the preparation and consumption of my chicken salad so I could make it to the shoreline before moonrise.

I nearly succeeded. Having passed under the viaduct on the edge of the Loyola campus, I saw two fat blood-red slices. It appeared about to move into the clear, so I practically jogged the last couple blocks in order to capture the photo I'd promised the Old Man. Given the resolution on his iPhone, I needn't've bothered. Although the day had been hot and muggy since mid-morning, I was met by a cooling breeze from the Lake.

I hung around the same small slice of shore for some time hoping for a better photo opportunity. But once the moon was high enough to have lost its autumnal colour I headed south to Granville. One of my work pals had said she'd be at the little café in the park there, but I didn't see her. I found a spot shaded from the streetlights and took one last snap of the light reflected on the waves. Then I noticed a man lurking nearby and became self-conscious about the valuable borrowed hunk of electronics in my hand. (I don't think twice about texting on my "key fob" since no one in their right mind would try to swipe that.)

As usual, I brought a couple mooncakes to work to slice up and leave out. I decided to bring them along to our morning meeting and saw them nearly vanish. (One of my Chinese coworkers says she's stopped bringing them in because no one seems to like them; she told me she likes white lotus paste, so I promised to bring in some of the cake I was hoarding at home.) We had a surprisingly valuable discussion and then I got a huge surprise: The whiteboard in the room had been flipped over and there were two literary quotes I'd written on it in a moment of boredom at least five years earlier. The ink on the Brecht couplet was so faded it had turned from green to apple-grey.

Wie trüb ist mein Sinn, wenn ich in der Fremde bin

To complement the Özdamar (nur noch fünf Seiten! Kritik morgen!), I ordered a film called Die Fremde. Literally, the name means "the [female] stranger" or, alternatively, "the foreign land", which is how I read it until I read an interview with the director, Feo Aladag.[*] It grew out of her research into honour killings among the Turkish community in Europe. (She herself is a native-born Austrian of Turkish heritage.) She noticed that most of them followed a similar script, which she took as her basis and elabourated into the moving tale of a young woman trying to live her own life apart from her abusive husband.

It may sound like a hackneyed subject, and in inept hands it could've been tedious to watch. But Aladag has the right approach. In the aforementioned interview, in answer to a question about why a particular character's development isn't made more explicit, she replies "Ich möchte nicht alles auserzählen." ("I'd rather not spell everything out.") And she holds to that. Some of the most important scenes contain no dialogue at all; you can tell from the actors' expressions what's been decided, but you never know exactly what the reasoning was.

At the same time, she gives everyone enough screen time that no one is a complete enigma or a cardboard cutout. It's Umay's story, but we see how everyone around her is affected by her decisions and what that drives them to do. This is most true, however, of her parents and her younger siblings; her older brother and her estranged husband are both presented at the start as unsympathetic men with a propensity for violence. Her flaw, on the other hand, is a touching unwillingness to accept that her family has really given up on her.

At times when watching this, I thought of my mother, who was also raised in a deeply religious family and took the unprecedented step of leaving her husband. There was a real risk that her father, who stopped speaking to his own sister after she divorced, would disown her. But she was more mature at the time and not burdened with the sorts of custody issues which are central to the plot. I also thought of the fears I had of being disowned when I figured out that I was gay and not willing to be closeted.

It's a beautiful film to look at, with excellent (but not unrealistic) use of locations in the Asian suburbs of Istanbul, Kayseri (the head of the family's native town), and particularly central Berlin. On balance, I think there's more dialogue in Turkish than in German. Despite living in Berlin, the parents speak virtually no German (aside from one brief exchange between the father and two policemen), Umay's German friends (including one with a Turkish given name) speak no Turkish, and everyone else--down to her young son--speaks a mix. The only real misfire is that the actor playing her younger brother, who should sound the most native in German, has a distinct accent (e.g. substituting [ej] for German /ai/ and [ʃ] for /ç/).

All in all, it's almost a polar opposite to Soul Kitchen and well worth a look. Aladag is a director to watch with the festival accolades to prove it. I didn't even recognise Sibel Kekilli from Gegen die Wand, she's playing such a completely different role here (although still oppressed by a conservative family) and inhabiting it flawlessly. I'm not at all surprised to find that Settar Tanrıögen is acclaimed in Turkey (although I never would've suspected he's only eight years my senior) and now I'm even more anxious to see Nursel Köse in Auf der anderen Seite.



[*] The English title is, rather puzzlingly, When We Leave. The double meaning doesn't work in Romance languages so only the first is translated. The Turkish title, Ayrılık, translates as "separation", inclusive of the legal sense.