YOL
Directed by Şerif Gören
Screenplay by Yilmaz Güney
Yilmaz Güney is a national movie idol, a world-class moviemaker and a convicted murderer. There are many, in Turkey and in the international film community, who believe that these three eminences are related. Güney is a firebrand of his country's intellectual left. His films—slow, ruminative, defiantly indigenous—smolder with an ideologue's indignation and a poet's ironic compassion. For these heresies and others, Güney has spent half of his adult life in prison. In 1974, while filming a scene in a crowded restaurant in Adana, Güney and his wife were insulted by a right-wing judge. A gun was fired; the judge died. At Güney's hearing, men stood up to proclaim that they, not he, had killed the judge. Güney was found guilty; he remained in jail until October 1981, when he escaped to Europe. This May, on the day Güney received a Palme d'Or for Yol at the Cannes Film Festival, Turkey demanded his extradition. He now lives in hiding.
In Yol, Güney is describing a milieu as familiar to him as the inside of a movie studio is to most Hollywood directors: a Turkish prison. This is not the glossy torture chamber of Midnight Express—no theatrical sadomasochism here, no melodramatizing of the color scheme, no soft-focus sexual groping—but a place where ordinary men endure the restless boredom of confinement. Five of them are given a week's pass to visit their families, and find that the same restrictions face them and their women on the outside. The country is a prison, every liberating impulse is indictable, and the more righteous villagers are all too willing to play judge and executioner. Adultery is punished by eight months of bread and water; indiscreet lovemaking demands instant and bloody death. In this remorseless landscape, where the subtlest smile on a stolid face can seem an act of anarchy, each prisoner must find fulfillment by pursuing his dark destiny.
Güney "directed" Yol while in prison, smuggling sketches and instructions for each shot of his screenplay to Şerif Gören, his assistant, who then realized Güney's film plan. Perhaps because of this long-distance arrangement, Yol possesses a clarity of imagery and an editorial crispness not evident in Güney's other films. It is dour but never dull; it proceeds with an assurance born of passion and technical expertise. The picture may thus serve as the announcement of an adroit new director in Gören, a canny marshaler of film machinery and actors' resources. But first and final credit must go to Güney. Time spent in the microcosm of a Turkish jail has educated him to the human idiosyncrasies of men under pressure. Each of Yol's characters moves to his own music, discovers his own reasons for being, refuses to be translated into a revolutionary slogan or a reactionary curse. Güney has composed, by remote control, an eloquent portrait of a society in contradiction with itself—a place where the peasants conspire with the government in baroque acts of repression, and where a film like Yol can be made but never shown. —By Richard Corliss