The Worst Film Ever

So much average

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Yol is an excellent movie in many respects. Acting is top notch, story has both substance and depth, cinematography is powerfully imposing and a beauty to watch, pacing and delivery is mature and well executed.That's all great but the real significance of this movie in my opinion is that it completes Guney's transformation from populist cinema to realist cinema. In this regard, members of the audience are given more freedom to come to their own conclusions, no embellishments or exaggerated/highlighted descriptions to make a point, no effigies to burn for the sake of an argument... subtle metaphors and a bleak, at times disheartening tone of delivery does the job just as well.This is Guney at his best and I feel privileged to have watched it in its 1999 reshowing, at 18 years of age, soon after the ban on the movie was lifted in Turkey. Unfortunately for 17 years, Guney's Yol was considered to be forbidden fruit by the gatekeepers of the oppressive Turkish regime. Now that the director has long passed away, his criticism lives on stronger than ever, in a bittersweet twist of irony.

In Yilmaz Güney's extraordinary Turkish odyssey (filmed by Gören from his script and detailed instructions while he was in jail), five prisoners are allowed a week's parole to journey home. In many ways it's a story about the tragedy of distances: the geographical and historical ones that still separate Turkey, and the distances imposed upon people by a military state and by a heritage that still expects husbands to punish by death wives taken in adultery. A kind of distance, too, makes this a film of the highest order. Its homesickness, for freedom above all, is very particular. Güney can't go home, and completed the film in exile. This perspective gives great clarity to his picture of the state of the nation, a state in suspense where something has to change, which gathers complexity and shifts effortlessly into universal allegory. The film's poetry, its combination of sound and image especially, has an unconscious innocence no longer available to most European and American narratives, and it is inspired by an enormous compassion for the suffering people endure at each other's hands in a world where the strong pick upon the weak, the weak upon the weaker.

Turkey is officially the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, along with Israel. But "Yol" shows that regardless of Turkey's official classification, it does have political prisoners. In this case, five of them are given a leave so that they can visit their families. While on their leaves, they (and the audience) get to see the realities of life. They may have been released from prison, but there are some metaphoric prisons that we can never escape, no matter how free we consider ourselves.It was interesting that Yilmaz Guney managed to make this movie from jail. He did a very good job here.

Five prisoners have been permitted to visit their homes. Each has a different story. In this movie, you will see people that cannot decide how their lives will be, all limited by nonsenses. You will see, in each frame of this movie, a well-taken photo of an expert photographer of the mood of people after a revolution. What you will see, is the most handsome actor of Turkey, Tarik Akan, in a far different role from all fun movies he had acted before this movie. Watch the best directing ever in Turkish cinema. This is one of the best dramas the world would ever see. Don't miss it. See the facts that Turkish people still avoid seeing.