Name: Süt
Genre: Drama
Released: 2009-01-02
Duration: 1 h 42 min
Rating: 6.6
Cast: Melih Selçuk, Basak Köklükaya, Riza Akin

Another visual marvel with plenty of food for thought

Must be hard if not impossible trying to make a life for yourself as an "intellectual" as we say in my country when you come from a village in the middle of nowhere. Life is tough out there and art and artists have no place.

The director is serving us visuals left and right and I'm here for it. Those ancient ruins coming out of nowhere in the beginning, actually that entire scene with that girl that actually came to nothing and we never see her again. But most of all that snake extraction scene was so gnarly. I have never seen anything like it in my life. Is that even possible? Again towards the middle I was wondering what the whole point of that scene was, since the woman was not Yusuf's mother as I had thought and it looked completely unrelated, but the snake whisperer makes another appearance. And we have another snake, of course. And a gigantic catfish towards the end.

It's a slow movie with plenty of natural landscape, like the other ones, farm scenes, but also shabby houses and old style interior decor, but it's all familiar in a way because it's pretty much the same in my country. Same with the poverty and lack of opportunity for people living in rural areas or in small towns. Nothing much happens objectively speaking, but there's a lot going on inside the main character's head. Could be one of several things, in fact you are left to fill in a lot for yourself, without any confirmation. There's clearly a lot going through Yusuf's mind.

It was funny when he found out his mother had a private life, till I remembered Turkey had honor killings and I got a little worried for a second or two, but this movie does not go there. In fact I was thinking at the very end that the most beautiful that his mother had ever looked was through his own eyes. And maybe the girl he was describing in his poem was in fact his own mother. In an innocent, needy way of course. She had raised him by herself and it's clear he wasn't social at all. She must have been his whole universe for a long time.

It took me a long time to sit down to watch this movie, in between the first and the last of the series because I couldn't find it in a decent version. In fact I had to watch it with Spanish subs, and I'm not fluent in Spanish, let alone in reading Spanish. Thankfully the dialogue is sparse and curt. I'm a little obsessed with getting the dialogue right so I paused it often to be able to read it in Spanish, but I got it.

Turkish cinema reflects the country's position between East and West, combining melodrama, political allegory, and contemplative realism. It often explores identity, memory, and the tension between tradition and modernity. The Yeşilçam era was prolific, while modern auteurs have gained festival prominence.

Tarık Akan and Şerif Sezer in Yol (1982)

The drama genre is a broad category that features stories portraying human experiences, emotions, conflicts, and relationships in a realistic and emotionally impactful way. Dramas delve into the complexities of human life, often exploring themes of love, loss, morality, societal issues, personal growth, with the aim to evoke an emotional response from the audience by presenting relatable and thought-provoking stories.

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Yusuff has a hard time defining his adulthood. In one hand, there are his mother's expectations while on the other hand his passions.

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Basak Köklükaya and Melih Selçuk in Süt (2008)

Basak Köklükaya, Semih Kaplanoğlu, and Melih Selçuk at an event for Süt (2008)

Süt

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