BOATS OUT OF WATERMELON RINDS (Ahmet Uluçay, 2004)

It has been compared to Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), but Karpuz kabuğundan gemiler yapmak, from Turkey, is far, far superior. Set in the 1960s in the Anatolian village of Tepecik, this autobiographical first feature by writer-director Ahmet Uluçay centers on two young teenaged boys who dream of becoming film directors. At the moment, however, their efforts are devoted to building a projector and trying to figure out how to get film images to move. Tepecik, as it happens, is Uluçay’s own home village, where he continues to live. Uluçay has populated his film, which is both charming and profound, with actual villagers, every one of whom delivers a beautiful performance. Attuned to the dreams and heartache of youth, this coming-of-age comedy is among the finest ones ever made.
     Each boy works: Recep, for a compassionate watermelon vendor; Mahmet, for a stern barber. Recep is in love—not with Guler, the daughter of the widow Nezihe, who is Recep’s age and who is smitten with him, but with her older sister, Nihal, who is about twenty. Observing Muslim decorum, Nihal pays the attentive Recep no mind—except secretly, privately she does. She hides away in order to read his letter of admiration and adoration. We expect she will snicker because she has smacked across the face Mahmet, who has delivered the letter to her in the street, calling him an imbecile and threatening to call the police. She does not snicker, however, but reads the long letter attentively, tenderly. In bed at night, Nihal secretly eats one of the walnuts with which Recep has gifted her and she has made a big show of rejecting.
     Uluçay’s poignant film is about the things we leave behind: a walnut; a weight the vendor used before selling his business in defeat.
     There is a shot that will move to tears anyone who loves the movies: a back view of Recep and Mahmet walking down a path in a field, with an interruption that suddenly places the pair farther down the path: a glorious hommage to cinema’s most celebrated film about a boy’s advance toward adulthood: Mark Donskoi’s The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938).
     Life teaches us about loss: for instance, the vendor’s loss of a livelihood. Nezihe remarries and moves from the village, who knows where, taking her daughters with her. And life teaches us about gain: Recep discovers how to project images so that they move. He is on his way.