'Bal' (Honey)

The Turkish film Bal — in English, Honey — is infused with a quiet power. The film’s rich and hauntingly soulful imagery makes it nearly impossible to do the material justice in a single review. Bal is the third film of director Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Yusuf Trilogy, which is set in the isolated Turkish countryside and focused on the young Yusuf and his parents. Shy, soft-spoken and stammering, Yusuf barely speaks in more than simple whispers to his beekeeper father, farmer mother and classmates. As Yusuf’s father’s bees disappear, so do the beautiful plants of the lush Turkish countryside; and the consequential loss of honey leads to a loss of innocence for the characters. Subtitles become superfluous as the viewer is drawn into Yusuf’s gaze: His wide brown eyes take up so much of his tiny face, his lower lip is tucked into his upper lip, and his breath comes in heaves the more emotional he gets. Kaplanoğlu’s camera lets us feel this child’s yearning, jealousy, shame and happiness. And the emotions are transmitted in the purest form of cinema. The film is strongly reminiscent of Víctor Eric's The Spirit of the Beehive, not simply for the fact that both father figures in the film are beekeepers, nor for the symbolic significance of honey in each, but rather for both Erice's and Kaplanoğlu's proficient touch at capturing the poetry in the childhood gaze.  Each frame is composed with a painterly sensibility, the natural sunlight bringing out the vibrancy of every color with which Kaplanoğlu uses to most saliently evoke the most precise emotion at any given moment. Despite a deliberate pace, Bal a thing of beauty that should be considered nothing less than essential viewing when it opens on March 25th at the Village East Cinema.