Gautaman Bhaskaran

Nothing can be more difficult than to draw a cartoon or write a movie about grief, guilt, revenge or rancour.

Director Bahman Ghobadi, who gave us splendid works like Turtles Can Fly, Half Moon and No One Knows About Persian Cats, has dealt with some of these in The Four Walls, which premiered at the ongoing Tokyo International Film Festival.

Although a trifle unfocused and long at 114 minutes, the movie, nonetheless, does mange to connect the viewer with the protagonist, Boran, played with a lot of feeling by Amir Aghaee. His trials and tribulations move us, sometimes to tears. His distressing disappointment becomes a part of us as we watch the scenes fly by.

The Four Walls begins with a shot of a barefoot woman running on the beach calling a man out at sea. And then the gun shot. Boran has made Istanbul his home for years, working as a shooter at the airport. His duty is to keep seagulls away from the runway so that they do not endanger the airplanes taking off and landing. He and several others are told explicitly not to shoot cranes, but only seagulls. When one of them kills a crane, the boss is unhappy.

It is this setting that leads us to Boran’s story of how he builds a house which enjoys a clear view of the sea, something his wife and kid have never seen, living as they are in interior Turkey. When they arrive and are on their way to see their home, a terrible automobile crash kills them. Boran goes into depression, and even the instrument he plays in the evenings as part of a music group can do little to ease his pain and guilt.

What if he had been a little more careful on the road, a ghastly tragedy could have been averted. When he returns to his apartment five months later, he notices that the view of the ocean has been blocked by a building. He is furious, and tries his best to undo the damage.

His friends like boatman Bashuk (Fatih Al), a genial Muezzin from the local mosque and an anxiety-ridden policeman, Fatih (Baris Yildiz), all try their best to shake Boran out of his misery. Adding to is a mysterious woman (Funda Eryigit), who becomes Boran’s shadow, much to his discomfort and even disdain.

The script sometimes pushes us into the wrong lane as when we see in an early sequence at the airport where Boran appears to be indulging in an unlawful activity. But this thread goes cold. What, though, lifts the narrative is Aghaee’s intense performance are the more comical moments. This is engaging, and in a largely all-male drama, the musical scenes ( Ghobadi and Vedat Yildirim) as well as Eryigit appear like a summer’s breeze, though she hides an awful truth.