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Beyond the Hill is built on a lot of impending moments. There is paranoia and suspicion pervading the rural Turkish landscape. It’s the sort of film where the amplified buzz of flies just can’t be good, or the sudden fall of rocks could mean a dangerous encounter with nomadic people. There is the expectation of escalation, a tension that rises and rises until the sudden release, like a rubber band finally breaking after a slow and continual stretch.
Yet Beyond the Hill is less like an ascent up a mountain or a hill and more like a trek across a plain. There are some interesting bumps in the terrain, but I don’t think that a few bumps are enough given what seemed to be at stake.
Beyond the Hill (Tepenin Ardi)
Director: Emin Alper
Rating: TBD
Country: Turkey
For about three quarters of its run time, Beyond the Hill is a taut drama about unseen nomadic people who may be seeking revenge for the death of a goat. Faik, an elderly landowner, shot the goat because it was grazing on his property. His son, Nurset, and grandsons, Caner and Zafer, are visiting as this paranoia builds, and the tension is high right from the beginning. It’s clear that Faik is used to his existence out in the wilderness, though his son and grandsons are out of their element.
The landscape is lushly shot, and any disturbance is heightened. The film is rich with paranoia, which kept me gripped for most of its duration and made me wonder about these unseen people and what they could do. The silence of the land can be broken so easily, whether by a sudden rustles of stones, the peal of a distant gunshot, or a stir on a ridge. Variations on the landscape mean something at all times.
There’s also Sulu, the son of one of Faik’s fellow farmers, who causes suspicions. He lives on his own in the wild with his dog. He’s not the best communicator, and seems detached from whatever vestige of “civilized” living that Faik’s farm represents. He’s almost like someone in between these worlds of Faik and the nomads — the Other from another mother.
The relationships between all these men becomes a major point of intrigue. As the oldest and most capable person there, Faik seems especially critical of everyone around him. There are questions of masculinity involved in a lot of his judgments, particularly where his sons and grandsons are concerned. Nurset can quote poetry but can’t do much else right in his lonely life; his son Caner can’t fire a gun responsibly, while Zafer suffers from some form of paranoid schizophrenia.
Both Caner and Zafer seems especially childish for their ages. Caner is extremely afraid of dogs and suspicious of Sulu from the outset. Zafer is prone to playing games of splish-splash and wandering aimlessly. They’re damaged in some fashion, or have maybe had their maturity stunted from leading relatively easy lives. Part of me wonders if Emin Alper was aiming at some larger critique of modern masculinity and maturity with these characters in addition to his examination of xenophobic attitudes.
But as we reach the last turn of Beyond the Hill, the film loses its sustained rhythms of paranoia, in-fighting, and suspicion. There is tension still, but it’s built on too many contrivances. There’s one contrivance involving Zafer which seems especially silly and out of the blue. He’s on medication for his schizophrenia, he’s reminded to take it, but he never does. Perhaps this is a comment on Nurset’s aloof style of parenting, though it’s probably just a convenient way to increase the drama.
So in that last quarter of the film, you’d think that there would be some resolution, or at least a sense of an end, but like the dangerous nomads, the resolution goes unseen. In the final minutes we get images of funny bravado and satirically pumped-up masculinity. It’s coupled with the only music in the film, a stirring march that sounds like the stuff of children playing soldier, but that’s about it. The rubber band is intact, the fuse is cut.
I’m not a traditionalist when it comes to storytelling, but to end this way seems like placing the period eight words before the end of a long sentence. It’s especially trite to come to a close like this through contrivances, like Zafer’s psychological problems and everyone’s reticence to tell the truth. These sorts of dumb acts are usually used to propel a film toward action capped by an exclamation point. Instead the film gives us ellipses.
Or perhaps Beyond the Hill gives us a question mark. It goes through family and masculinity and notions of the Other, it gives us incredible landscapes and moments of taut silence and noise, but it’s as if by the end, all it has to say is, “Who are the real nomads?” I mean, really?
