Posted April 27, 2007
Times and Winds
Starring: Ozkan Ozen, Ali Bey Kayali, Elit Iscan, Bulent Ermin Yarar, Taner Birsel
Director: Reha Erdem

Times and Winds

Nobody can fault the Tribeca programming committee for opening up its arms to the farthest regions of world cinema, but there's a calculated sameness and slightness in many of their picks that does a disservice to the cultures they represent. This isn't to say that Turkish director Reha Erdem's mountain-village drama Times and Winds is meritless, nor is it quite as forgettable as the fest's now-standard, third-world weepies (each nearly critic-proof because of their sensitive subject matter). But it's certainly not as profound nor powerful as its overused Arvo Pärt score portentously commands.

To be fair, Times and Winds offers plenty to like as an innocuous crowd-pleaser. Gorgeous and haunting in its cinematography — with a fresh eye for environmental expanses and textures — this Islamic coming-of-ager literally follows (via complex tracking shots) the daily rhythms of a few pre-teen friends. One boy's hot for teacher, another despises his imam father, and their female classmate is troubled over her mother's pregnancy, but there's never enough weight in each of their struggles to make audiences feel their frustrations; we're always let off the hook before it becomes too uncomfortable.

Taken as tone poetry, there are multiple devices that tether the visual silences, including title cards for the various times of prayer ("Night," "Evening," "Afternoon," et al.) and an intriguing (but once again, overused) pan down to a child sleeping, covered in the stones, grains, grass or other surfaces that make up this village stuck in time. Rhyming imagery depicts parallels between death and birth, fathers and sons, people and animals; in finding the line between simplicity and obviousness, however, there isn't a deeper understanding here into this specific place or mankind itself. Times and Winds may revel in its own beauty, but it clearly doesn't pass the "exoticism test," which is: would anybody watch the film if it were in English, with American actors?

— Aaron Hillis