15 July 2011
Film releases: July 15
Nigel Andrews / Financial Times

How do you make a film about contemplation? Does the audience sit there contemplating the contemplator? At Berlin last year Semih Kaplanoglu’s Bal (Honey), from Turkey, won the Golden Bear. Detractors derided its minimal story, about a stammering boy’s nearly mute growing up and his regaining of the power of wonder after the death of his beekeeper father. They quipped that the film’s title had given it an unfair advantage. (Bear? Honey? Get it?) Admirers, including me and a Werner Herzog-led jury, raved deliriously. The movie’s magic is all in the colour, the landscapes and the sounds – yes, Simon and Garfunkel were right – of silence.

This is the completing film in Kaplanoglu’s trilogy of nutritive titles after Eggs and Milk. The common themes are bereavement, catharsis, beauty, the re-making of a human being’s vision. The last movie is the most human of all, though you still need patience. You do have to contemplate the contemplator, sharing with him the inward rollercoaster ride that is childhood. The classroom scenes alone are captivating: a boy who can barely speak using his whole face and body to reflect, and radiate, the fear, suspense and quiet miraculousness of learning. Bora Altas’s performance, as the boy – touching, funny, incandescent – is one of those classic screen turns by a child, up there with The Kid and The Red Balloon.