Show and Tell (Here, Then, Voice of My Father)

As you may have gathered from some of my earlier blog entries, I tend to be favorably disposed towards movies that are difficult to understand. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I enjoyed Mao Mao’s Here, Then (2012), which more than most films feels like the work of a director consciously testing the limits of how much information he can withhold from the viewer without alienating them completely. The story is divided into two parts, each focusing on a separate set of characters with no apparent connection to the other — a group of small town teenagers in the former, several affluent urbanites in the latter — and its meanings are somewhat obscure, which itself might’ve been enough to frustrate some viewers. But what makes the movie especially difficult to understand is the oblique style in which the action is presented and the sparse dialogue that raises as many questions as it answers.

Sometimes in the film what appears to be a straightforward establishing shot conceals as much as it shows — as in an early scene that opens on a dirt path in the countryside. A group of people carrying suitcases appear along the bottom of the screen, and after climbing over an unseen barrier, exit the frame on the right. It’s only when a car zooms by in the foreground that it becomes apparent that the people have just gotten off a bus by the side of the freeway. (In China, there often isn’t any sign to indicate a small village near the main road.) Among the travelers is a boy in a blue jacket, who sits down on the barrier and lights a cigarette as the others continue walking along the path behind him. This scene establishes that the boy has just returned to his hometown, but the manner in which the shot is framed obscures this point by excluding both the bus and the road. On the other hand, the fact that another character suffers from dry, itchy skin is important enough to be mentioned twice in the dialogue, but it’s never explained why. The second time it comes up, the woman’s sugar daddy reproaches her for not drinking enough water, but if the explanation were really that simple I doubt the movie would’ve brought it up in the first place. I’m sure that a second viewing of the film would clarify some things, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand it completely. Not that that’s a bad thing.

Less demanding but still deserving of attention, Zeynel Dogan and Orhan Eskikoy’s Voice of My Father (also 2012) tells the story of an elderly Kurdish woman, Basê (Basê Dogan), who lives by herself in the Turkish city of Elbistan, and her assimilated adult son, Mehmet (Zeynel Dogan), who wants her to come live with him in Diyarbakir. After discovering an old audio tape that Basê recorded when he was a child, Mehmet decides to pay his mother a visit, but when he asks her about the tapes that his father sent home from Germany, Basê — who still keeps her husband’s old things in plastic bags — claims to have lost them. There’s not a lot of action and the film’s style is entirely straightforward with many scenes consisting of nearly static tableaus of the characters sitting in rooms and talking in long shot. What makes the movie compelling is the manner in which it slowly unravels this family’s troubled history.

To an extent, the film resembles a detective story in which Mehmet comes to learn things about his family, and for the most part, the narration is restricted to his range of knowledge. We only see Mehmet’s father, Mustafa, briefly and in extreme long shot in the flashbacks that open and close the movie, and we don’t see his older brother Hassan at all, though we hear their voices on the tapes that the family used to stay in touch while Mustafa was away. That said, our identification with Mehmet is complicated somewhat by the fact that he knows things about his family that we only gradually discover, such as the reason for Hassan’s absence, while on the other hand, the film reveals things to us that Basê is hiding from him. In one scene, Mehmet tells his mother that he remembers Mustafa hitting him when he was a child but Basê angrily denies it and goes to bed. Subsequently, over a shot of Basê standing outside her home at an unspecified time (possibly representing a dream), we hear an audio recording of Mustafa which not only confirms that this really happened but also gives one a sense of his character. I know this is a radical idea, but sometimes all a movie needs to do is tell a good story.