Trilogies are rare birds in the species we call movies.  When they exist at all they seem to come from a decision related to projected profits rather than a powerful creative impulse.  Rocky was a hit.  Made a lot of money.  Let’s do Rocky II!  Or Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter…  The Internet Movie Database list of the top 25 movie trilogies is what, disheartening?  Entertaining? Maybe.  Thought provoking? Not.

Of the sub-species called “art film,” only Satyajit Ray‘s “Apu Trilogy” comes readily to mind — and that has not found enough demand to get DVD copies into mass-rental sources. More mental digging will find Krzysztof Kieślowski Blue, White, Red — Three Colors Triology, and   Rossellini’s post WW II neoealist trilogy,  Open City,  Paisan, and Germany, Year Zero.  Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy bridges the divide between pure entertainment and serious art. There are more, but it’s not a big collection.

Now a director from Turkey, Semih Kaplanoglu, adds his own exotic creatures — three films with simple one-word (in Turkish and English) titles: Egg, Milk, Honey. Released in that order, 2007, 2008 and 2010, they track periods in the life of one Yusuf, 6, 20, 35.

In the first, Egg, (2007) Yusuf [Nejat Isler, a well regarded actor] is 35 or so and returns to Tire, the rural town of his youth, from his Istanbul bookstore,  for his mother’s funeral.  While there, he is drawn to Ayla [Saadet Aksoy]  a young distant cousin who had nursed the mother in her decline, and to memories and re-attachement to the rural life he and his mother had shared.

Milk,(2008) picks up with that rural life.  Yusuf [now played by Melih Selcuk, handsome but less compelling than Isler]  is about twenty.  He and his quite handsome mother [Basak Köklükaya] live in rural poverty, making do with a few milk-cows and a meager motorcycle delivery service.  Yusuf’s sole feeling, and ambition, is to be a poet, leading to what his mother regards as laziness and wool-gathering. He fails his military physical, and can’t quite graduate from college.  After he discovers his mother having a liaison with a town government official, his world collapses.  In the closing scenes he is working in a mine with a friend, who also has literary dreams.

Honey, (2010) (and previously reviewed here) introduces Yusuf [Bora Altas] as a very young boy, six or so, adoring his honey farming father Yakup [Erdal Besikçioglu], and following him to collect from hives set high in the branches of trees.  [Honey is still a major source of pride and income in at least the southern parts of Turkey, where pine-honey, lavender-honey and many others, are prized for their  tastes and restorative powers.] Yusuf’s mother, Zahra, [Tülin Özen — unfortunately not the same actress who plays her in Milk, set 15 years later, when her features would be quite similar] is quiet to the point of neglect. Even given Kaplanoglu’s always quiet, meditative film making the lack of mother-child connection is striking.   One touching scene, of caressing the young boy’s hair, is all that redeems her.    Honey ends with the death of the father in a climbing accident and the impoverishment of the mother and child, which we have seen in its later years in Milk.

What to say about these films, their connection to one another, and their revalatory power of the human, or Turkish, condition?  One wants to embrace them.  Some viewers have.  Each has received awards.  Honey took the Berlin Festival’s Golden Bear award in 2010; Milk was a nominee for the Venice Festival Golden Lion in 2008; Egg took Best Film award at the Istanbul Festival in 2008.  Yet they are difficult films, even for the interested audience.  Kaplanoglu is definitely his own man, not someone to do something because it will please others.

In each film there are stunning landscapes — water, forests, plains– which reward the steady meditative gaze he turns on them.  In each, one or two of the actors stands out.  The small Bora Altas in Honey is as rewarding a child actor as you’ll find in movies, and playing against type — solemn and attentive, he does not win us because of cute antics. The cousin in Egg,  Saadet Aksoy draws us in with her quiet homeliness –in its original meaning– despite her stunning beauty.  Basak Köklükaya in Milk, as the mother of an about-to-be-grown son, drawn to an affair in the last years of her youthful good looks, touches us.

There are many scenes of Turkish life, interiors and exteriors, rural and wooded, customs of burial and mourning, making a living, men and women taking each other in but with such restraint we more demonstrative types would not recognize as interest being shown.

But Kaplanoglu has set himself a formidable task.  Narrative drive is not his strength, or even interest. Clever editing is not to be found.  Swooping, flying, following camera work is absent. Long, long takes are the norm.

The static frame is his chief device.  There may have been some tracking shots in the movies, though I don’t recall them.  There are sometimes slow pans.  One that left me wondering was of Yusuf’s torso, slowly slowly from his face down his work dirty trousers, to his boots.  A full minute?  End of shot.

Often, and this may be Kaplanoglu‘s purpose, there is so much nothing going on in a shot that, if we attend at all, we talk to ourselves:  what is going on here?  What is the purpose of the scene?  Am I missing something? Why is he doing this?  What is he asking of the viewer?

He is a devotee of the inexplicable:  Yusuf falls down in a courtyard, in some kind of a trance.  He is helped up by a kindly neighbor.  End of reference.  A young girl is hung upside down over a pail of boiling milk and a snake emerges from her mouth.  Not referred to again.  An egg smashes.  A woman walks towards the camera along a rural road, she fills the frame, turns and leaves it. The camera turns and picks her up again. She walks until she disappears — a two minute take from beginning to end. And she does not appear again — unless she is the deceased mother, but we don’t know.

Perhaps this is all a kind of filmic zen.  Why should anything be obvious at first viewing, or even at repeat viewings?   Perhaps connections and meanings will come in dreams — as the older Yusuf has.  Perhaps none will come, and that’s ok. Perhaps the camera is as we ourselves often are with long semi-absent gazes at a tree, a lake, a woman, to then go on without wondering or even thinking further about what we have seen.

But a film maker is spending a lot of effort, time and money, to set before us some continuous sequence of images and sounds.  Idle gazing would not seem to be a part of such a construction.

Milk which I saw last, seemed to me to have the strongest story line, with building of tension and release, we are accustomed to.  The beginning shots, with the young woman suspended over the milk pail,  are the strangest you may ever see.  The closing scenes of goose hunting, embracing a giant carp then offering it to the mother only to see her plucking a goose, are both strange and yet powerfully explanatory.  Honey, with the small boy, is quite marvelous for the life of the child it brings us, but difficult for the silence he lives in.  Egg, perhaps is the strangest, though with finally, a desired resolution, a finding of the peace, the stillness in the heart, which the films have wanted even as they unsettle us, giving us the jitters as we wait “for something to happen.”

Despite their release order, inverse to the life of the man, I’d suggest watching them in the life sequence: Honey, Milk, Egg,

 Yumurta/Egg and Bal/Honey are available at Netflix.  Sut/Milk is on DVD and available at some Marin County libraries.