The Road (1982)

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

In this superb and rather restrained film, the soft, earthy and underexposed visual style juxtaposes the harsh sonic shrieks of a child playing violin, train whistles and screeching breaks, howling wolves in the wind, and a woman screaming for her life in an arctic wasteland. Similarly, the simplicity and passivity of the prisoners is contrasted with the mechanistic social and structural violence surrounding them.There's a strange innocence to the way in which most of the main characters in this film use their fleeting moments of freedom to further imprison themselves in pain, obligation and debt. Of the five stoic, yet gentle prisoners given a week's parole to travel to their respective homes, all of them are transported into different contexts of confinement -- whether emotional, psychological or physical -- full of restrictions and seemingly foregone conclusions.Restrictions on the freedom of movement, sexual urges, existential choice, gender roles and other forms of social behavior creates a kind of emotional numbness in the main characters' (and their wives')already drained dispositions. In light of their inability to negotiate their surroundings, it seems as though many of them willingly succumb to what they might perceive as a pre-determined fate.Looking at just one of the five stories: after arriving home, one of the men is encouraged to kill his adulterous wife in order to save the family reputation while she's held in isolation as a prisoner in a remote mountain village. The roles have now been reversed and the situation grows in complexity to the point where the man's indecisiveness contributes to his wife's death in a vast, frozen landscape. In the film's greatest sequence, the man takes his wife and son back across the arctic emptiness where the carcass of his abandoned horse -- one of the many symbols of freedom and strength in the film-- lies picked apart by birds, wolves and the wind in the very place where his wife will die, providing the perfect image of a man, a woman, a child and a country exposed, ravaged and forsaken in an emotional wasteland.

Five prisoners have been permitted to visit their homes. Each has a different story. In this movie, you will see people that cannot decide how their lives will be, all limited by nonsenses. You will see, in each frame of this movie, a well-taken photo of an expert photographer of the mood of people after a revolution. What you will see, is the most handsome actor of Turkey, Tarik Akan, in a far different role from all fun movies he had acted before this movie. Watch the best directing ever in Turkish cinema. This is one of the best dramas the world would ever see. Don't miss it. See the facts that Turkish people still avoid seeing.

This movie moved me deeply, although there are many cliches in it. It is made out of honesty and frustration over the turkish society, and especially the treatment of the kurds. I think it was filmed in secrecy inside Turkey, as the director was banned from the country and lived in exile. The actors do a magnificent job. I just got awestruck by this film. To understand it completely on should be aware of the desperate situation the kurds in Turkey have lived with for many years now. After I saw at at my local filmclub, I was unable to speak for an hour. If one has the oppurtunity to see it - please do so, you will not regret it.

The artistry of this movie is astonishing in virtually every aspect of its filmmaking. What makes that all the more remarkable is that the footage was all shot by the assistant director in Turkey then taken to Switzerland for Yilmaz Güney (a brilliant writer/director who had to leave Turkey to escape persecution and imprisonment, mostly because of his empathy for the plight of the Kurdish people under Turkish rule) to edit and dub. The cinematography is colorful, rich and varied. The musical sound track is beautiful and well-integrated. The various subplots seem to echo and build on each other. Somehow, while making the grim realities of modern Turkey all too evident, this film also left me with a feeling of the indomitability of those who struggle for freedom.