Review: Turtles Can Fly | Times and Winds

If you’re going to make a film about children, you need to make sure that the children are, well, childlike. This is the downfall of Times and Winds, an almost charming story set in the picturesque hills of northern Turkey. Young Omer, its central character, resents his upstanding father and spends his hours devising ways to kill him. I suppose it’s an achievement in itself that these efforts come across as quirky rather than psychotic, but nevertheless, the film is let down by its child actors. They all have the slightly wooden manner that makes you think there’s an adult just out of the frame, telling them what to do. Numerous issues are covered: sibling jealousy, the pain of feeling unloved by a parent, the realisation of sex, the heartbreaking imperfection of our parents, humiliation, inadequacy, desire, taboo. But the film itself jars; it is sometimes badly pieced together, or sometimes badly acted, or both. As you stumble out of the cinema, blinking, you’d be forgiven for imagining that you had accidentally wandered into an exhibition of beautiful landscape stills, only they happened to be moving.


Director Bahman Ghobadi, by contrast, despite the unremitting grimness of Turtles Can Fly, manages to imbue each scene with a sense of hope that must be attributed to the spirit of the child non-actors who make up its cast. Set in a Kurdish refugee camp in northern Iraq just before the US invasion, the story revolves around Satellite, a young, intelligent and wonderfully manipulative natural leader, and three newcomers to the village: an armless boy who can tell the future, his sad and silent sister, and a kid who appears to be their little brother. They and the other children in the community, many of whom have suffered horrific injuries, spend their days plucking land mines out of the surrounding hills and selling them on. The situation is bleak, and so is the story, which makes the frequent humour and vitality exhibited by the kids really quite impressive. The only problem with the film is that it does kind of portray the US invasion as a good thing, which is almost certainly a nonsense. But since the story ends just after news of the invasion arrives, we can perhaps interpret this as a symbol of the hope that people felt about the change of regime, before they realised what an awful disaster it would prove to be. Perhaps.

The Dark Knight

Why has The Dark Knight grossed such spectacular revenues? Comic book adaptations are certainly reliable box-office fodder these days, and there has been considerable hype surrounding Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in the context of his untimely demise.

But there’s more to it than this. There’s something about film that seems to ring true; something that makes sense, appears apt, that reflects something meaningful about our present condition.

Commentators have already pointed to the political implications of the film: some wondering whether Obama or McCain or Bush or Cheney can be better identified with the Dark Knight; others noting how there are ten minutes in the middle of the film during which the Joker is referred to as ‘a terrorist’ in speech accompanied by all the appropriate rhetoric – “do we want to give in to terrorists?” etc.

Yet on a less superficial level, what can the film’s central preoccupation (i.e. anarchy vs. society’s laws and norms) reveal about the nature of the anxieties gripping modern, liberal culture today?

Perhaps it’s because I worked on the bloody thing for four long months, but I can’t help seeing my dissertation in all this. In it, I tried to investigate the phenomenon of suicide bombing from an unorthodox perspective. Rather than seek to either condemn the practice wholeheartedly or empathise with the plight of the one who explodes him- or herself in most abject desperation, I was concerned with suicide bombing’s place in liberal modernity. How is it a product of the modern; and what does it reveal about our liberalism?

The reason suicide bombing is ensconced within such a polarising discourse, I argued, is that our liberal order operates through a kind of generosity; a gift that cannot be returned. Put very simply, it includes you, even if you don’t want to be included. Your identity is formed, it has a place within this order: it is rationalised.

If, however, you challenge your positioning – if, like the suicide bomber, you challenge the very preconditions of social existence – we will still find a way to rationalise your behaviour. We will call it evil, or illegitimate, or the product of indoctrination, or the result of oppression and injustice. We will insist that it fails, lest we admit to “giving in to terrorists”. We will cast you out, as our inhuman antithesis. (although, as my dissertation argues, this exclusion is simultaneously a kind of inclusion – just as the Joker insists that Batman needs his anarchic other)

In other words, we will understand you, in some form or another. Our biggest fear is that you will continue to defy our logic, our attempts to rationalise what you do. And this is precisely the fear that The Dark Knight articulates. Studies of suicide bombers show that they are very much human, despite the inhumanity of their actions. They are sons and daughters, students, employees, people with emotions and goals and prejudices. Their demonisation perhaps has its culmination in the character of the Joker: a caricature of irrationality and destruction. He cannot be persuaded or bribed, nor can his motivations be rationalised. He simply must be stopped. And yet the most difficult task is to stop the person who doesn’t share such mundane concerns as the preservation of life.

It’s possible to read all sorts of things into The Dark Knight, and I don’t know how much of it was intentional. But what’s clear to me is that whilst the ‘terrorist’ receives nothing more than an extreme caricature, the film reveals rather more about the specifically modern, liberal anxiety presently gripping American and European societies.