aleladebirali

One of the best Turkish movies I have seen in a while.

As the train the movie's point-of-view character (Leyla) took moves forward to its destination, the plot thickens. We see some of Anatolia from the train and on the train. 'The Blue Train' has a cozy atmosphere in which Leyla and other passengers who are like a summary of the Turkish society engage in simple but also interesting conversations. Tea, the road, everyday problems, secrets... Almost everything about life is on that train so that we could learn more about death and why anyone would come to desire it.

The movie is so full of lovely poetry and literary references in Turkish that I do hope the subtitles can live up to them.

I strongly recommend it. It's best to watch it in a chilly day and critique it afterwards with friends at a café that is as cozy as 'the Blue Train', which is exactly what I did.

I ignore all the annoying and false things like they chose to shoot the movie in the worst possible streets, the girl can freely throw grenades in crowded streets of Istanbul, the Turkish police using junkie cars and 80% of the women in Turkey are covered in black sheets... However, there's one more grave mistake that can't be overstated. What the hell is "US Embassy" doing in Istanbul? US embassy is in Ankara where is the capital of the country! There's only a "US consulate" in Istanbul, that has a nice and mighty building which they could have and should have used. You don't have to be an expert on Turkey to make a movie there, but being unaware of its true capital and presenting another city as capital reveal a unique level of ignorance.

And the story in general was weak. It's obvious that they wanted to make more money from success of the first movie. You can watch it for guns and blazings.

Undoubtedly he's not the first native intellectual to depict Anatolia like that. In some respect, he's merely going on with traditional leftist point of view in Turkey, that presents the countryside as just backward, ignorant, unhappy, suffering, unaware of anything and sometimes cruel... You can find no shred of happiness in the movie. Nor can you see anything else close to happiness or something "positively Turkish" except a few jokes mixed with bitterness. Surely he's not obliged to advertise countryside of Anatolia. But this kind of gloomy perspective makes one think that N.B. Ceylan's irritatingly pushing joy out of life and his way of looking at life may be incomplete.

And time slows down as in almost any other N.B. Ceylan's movies. For instance, we watch a character breathing and doing nothing, for a relatively long time. Or we wait actors to pass the corridor, etc...

But there's still that magic that nails you into your chair. And you absolutely feel that you're watching a movie shot by a 1st class professional. The shots are marvellous and make one to want to go for a road trip there. Despite all my negativity on the movie, I strongly recommend it.