Watchtower
A Man and a Woman Seeking Refuge from the World

The Watchtower

By Howard Feinstein11 September 2012 / www.screendaily.com

“Situation normal,” is the blanket walkie-talkie response from guards in several isolated forest watchtowers to their boss in this lovely gem of a small film that, without rush, earns its dramatic stripes once the leisurely set-up evolves into a rewarding burst of unleashed psychological and emotional energy.

Although prejudice against women, especially in rural Turkey, is never out of the director’s sights, she keeps it contained so that the personal tale is never overshadowed by more theoretical concerns.

The watchtower where the story is set will end up with anything but a normal situation. Esmer is in top form, mapping lonely troubled characters who work out their demons amidst luscious, fog-wrapped hills and tall verdant trees.

Nihat (Simsek) is a new hire, satisfied to be by himself in his tower after the automobile deaths of his wife and young son, for which he was responsible. Seher (Erdonmez) is a pretty young woman who has hurriedly left university to work nearby in a provincial bus station for an older relative, tending his café and serving as a tour hostess. Living in the facility’s dank basement, she trying to ride out an out-of-wedlock pregnancy for as long as possible.

Inevitably Nihat and Seher meet in the cafe. The back stories do not fit into a simple mould of masculine (phallic tower) and feminine (childbirth in a basement) but rather into a much more complex, carefully thought out encounter of two seemingly hapless souls who find salvation once the baby, which she abandons but he rescues and gets her to embrace, becomes a catalyst for positive action and for affection.

There is not a lot more to the narrative. Esmer in more interested in character observation and poignant mise-en-scene than gratuitous action. Nihat’s epiphany is quick: He rushes to save and take care of her child. Hers takes more time: She rejects the little boy, a product of incest, until her rage has dissipated (Erdonmez’s breakdown is a raw, magnificent performance.

Little by little anger turns into love. A sudden small kiss signals her change in attitude. Because Nihat is illegally hiding Seher in the tower, they are forced to put on a show of marriage. Once they share the responsibilities of caring for a newborn, Esmer seems to strongly suggest that they will build some kind of constructive, perhaps loving, relationship.

As original, well-made, and dramatically fulfilling as this Turkish-German-French coproduction is, chances for any substantial return outside of Turkey for The Watchtower (Gozetleme Kulesi) are limited. There is little market for such a Turkish-language product, especially a mostly slow-moving one. Festivals will be the primary exhibition venues.

Although prejudice against women, especially in rural Turkey, is never out of the director’s sights, she keeps it contained so that the personal tale is never overshadowed by more theoretical concerns. Esmer is less interested in broad strokes of social commentary than in the details of the couple’s journeys and the landscapes in which they operate. Her favoured strategy, an ultra-slight mini-zoom, is testament to the intimate scale in which she is most at home. It pays off.

Audience Reviews / Letterboxd.com

    Review by rhett aka christee aka bogmummy ****

    A quiet, tender account of harm and accident. The accident of existence. Strong performances set amidst beautiful landscapes. The "oomph" of the penultimate scene might have been better woven throughout, but all in all a poetic film.

+++

    Review by Erik Swallow ***½
Nihat has taken a job at a remote fire station watchtower in the forest. He crosses paths with Seher, a young woman working as a hostess at a rural bus station. Each is trying to escape a past fraught with pain and guilt, and each finds in the other something akin to solace. "Watchtower" is a potent film with a deliberate pace that slowly reveals the characters' lives, keeping one transfixed til the end.

+++

    Review by EDoublez **
    Quicktake: Beautifully shot, but ultimately a ploddingly paced character study that goes nowhere.

+++

Review by Shaswata Ray ****
85/100
Technically sound character study with exceptionally beautiful cinematography and production values. Thanks to MUBI for this one.
Strong performances set amidst gorgeous landscapes. It seems a little unsure of itself towards the end and some may find the conclusion a bit abrupt, but these are only minor complaints in an otherwise indie masterpiece.

Watchtower (2012)

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Bernardo Villela / themovierat.com

There are films about situations and there are films driven by their characters. There are not as many that find an interesting situation, and the right characters to place in that situation, as Watchtower does. The characters of interest in the film are Seher (Nilay Erdonmez) and Nihat (Olgun Simsek). Each has a rather different job: Nihat has just started working in a watchtower where basically he’s looking to see if anything out of the ordinary is going on in the surrounding mountains and forests in the Turkish countryside; this usually would have to do with the prevention of rampant wildfires. Nihat, meanwhile, is a hostess on a cross-country bus line. In this way their paths do occasionally intersect.

The film builds well dedicating long portions to telling the story of each of these solitary and willfully ostracized people. It soon becomes clear that each has a secret that is a great burden to them. The secrets, and their situations, will inevitably join their narrative strands. We know this.

The unfurling of the stories spins much like water going down a drain; circling ever closer to the truth of the matter. The performances, especially that of Erdonnez, are wonderful.

This film only faces one true stumbling block, and it is one that holds it back from the greatness it seems destined to achieve for much of its running time. The glimpses of the characters and their plights are riveting for how the film slowly unravels what bothers them about their predicament and why they feel they cannot share it. However, the situation they find themselves in together struggles to find a conclusion and eventually, for all intents and purposes, drops the narrative.

I’ve sat with this ending and thought on it for some time. It’s not the kind of, let’s call it an “open” ending for lack of a more suitable term; that elevates the film. Conversely it is not one that undoes a great deal of the good that was accomplished before it. However, it is still a disappointing and unsatisfactory close to the tale.

There reaches a point in a certain kind of narrative where if you move past the plot point you’re on you’ve stopped telling one tale and moved on to another altogether. Therefore, that ending has to feel like a button, and what occurs afterward can be explored in another film or in the mind of the viewer. I think that Inception would actually be a good, recent, widely-viewed example of that (not that these films bare any similarity). The point being that the last image was meant to be the last image in that film. It had to be. Here it felt a bit like settling and that’s highly unfortunate, but not ruinous to the whole.

Watchtower has characters with baggage who are in binds and meet a crossroads. It is interesting to watch them get there, and see how they interact when their paths cross. I just wanted to go on their journey a little longer, and that can’t be all bad, now can it?