More Cosmetic Than Cosmic
From Berlinale Panorama, the story of a healer who visits a Turkish town, and of the strange events that follow: Reha Erdem's KOSMOS.
KOSMOS
The Berlinale Panorama film KOSMOS (Turkey) strains hard to elevate the banalities of small-town life in Turkey into something approaching sublimity. It has some beautiful shots of snow-covered lanes and moonlit nights, and slaughterhouses and poultry. Unfortunately though, the film’s loosely structured and mostly uninvolving tale of a trespassing idiot-savant with Christ-like healing powers fails to provide any kind of support to those occasionally great shots.
Kosmos, played bravely by Sermet Yeşil, enters the life of a town when he rescues a local boy who has fallen into the river. The townspeople, grateful and curious, invite him to have tea with them and listen to him hold forth on such issues as the nature of evil, the kindness of strangers, and the Manichean balance of the world. As his stay is extended, however, mysterious occurrences befall this eventless town: shops are broken into and robbed, people suffering disease are cured.
I really couldn’t tell you what the point of the film is. Writer-director Reha Erdem hasn’t created a world that draws you in; nor are any of the characters even vaguely sympathetic. It might perhaps have been intended as a contemporary parable. KOSMOS is set in a border-town, with distant sounds of bombing and local campaigns to have the border opened. The whole picture has a political angle, I suppose, although I couldn’t tell you what that angle is. The primary effect of KOSMOS, then, remains more cosmetic rather than cosmic.
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