On the most obvious level Semih Kaplanoğlu’s slow yet beautifully poetic film, which won the Golden Bear at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival, is about the close relationship of a small boy called Yusuf (Bora Altas) and his beekeeper father in a wooded, mountainous region of Turkey.
The hives are kept high in the branches of tall trees that Yusuf’s beloved father, Yakup (Erdal Besikçioglu), climbs using ropes. Just how dangerous this is becomes clear within the film’s opening scene when the rope suspending Yakup from a great height snaps and he tumbles, to be suspended precariously on a lower branch that could snap any minute.
Here the film leaves him, flashing back to establish his life with his wife, Zehra, and son in a spacious wooden cabin on the edge of a forested hillside. Here he gives his son reading lessons and carves a wooden boat for the eager boy in his workshop, before taking him on an expedition into the woods to inspect his new hives. The son, meanwhile, traipises alone through the forest every day to his school, where his stuttering during reading lessons makes him the object of ridicule to his male and female classmates. He’s a sadly isolated kid.
The film is then in the tradition of sensitive tales about the lives of children we have seen from such filmmakers as Abbas Kiorostami (Where is the Friend’s Home?), Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon), the Taviani brothers (Padre Padrone) and Satyajit Ray (The Apu Trilogy). In terms of plot and drama interplay, little happens – the incident depicted in the opening scene is the most dramatic in the whole film.
But as Kaplanoğlu makes obvious as early as the opening minutes, he’s not interested in conventional storytelling so much as the sensual texture of life in this apparently remote spot and the intense feelings experienced by his young protagonist and his parents.
So, as much as Honey is about Yusuf and Yakup, it’s also about the sound of the wind rustling through the trees, the cry made by a falcon as it’s released and the buzzing of the bees inside the hive. The director’s long-take aesthetic combines with Baris Ozbicer’s glorious cinematography (both outside and in the dark interiors) and Rainer Heesch’s attuned-to-nature sound design to offer an inherently cinematic experience that is quietly meditative.
Unfortunately not mentioned in the Madman packaging is the fact the film is the final part of a trilogy depicting episodes from Yusuf’s life in reverse order – the earlier films, Milk and Egg, depict his later life as a poet – something that makes Kaplanoğlu’s poetic approach to his material seem all the more appropriate.
