User Reviews

*** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

I must admit that I was a bit skeptical about this movie. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin, but, first, it's a German co-production (so, who knows...) and second, festival winners are not always the movies that bowl me over.

After having seen it, I must say that I am very touched. The reviews about the movie always focus on the beautiful and calm storytelling and the awesome Anatolian landscapes. But in my view it's primarily a chamber play with a quite depressing story. The young boy Yussuf suffers from strong stuttering. The only person he opens to is his father, a beekeeper. Only with his father the boy can communicate, he whispers complete sentences and expresses his feelings. At the end of the movie, the son will realize that his father died in the woods, the last screen showing the child sleeping under a giant dark tree.

The acting from the boy is superb. There are many heartwarming scenes, especially when the boy sees his mother crying and drinks a cup of milk (what he normally hates to do), looking hopefully at her afterward, as if his self-conquest could change anything about the cruel situation. In this scenes the movie really manages to take us into the child's world.

What makes the movie a little irritating is not only the slow rhythm (that helps to create those real-life magic moments) and the very few dialogue, but also the lack of emotional gestures, especially between Yussuf and his mom. If the director of the film would have been let's say Michael Haneke, it would surely not be interpreted as a hymn to (natural) life, but as a sober analysis of failed communications.

Finally, if you generally do not like slow and minimalistic movies, don't watch this one. It's breathtaking slowly, and very many and very long scenes will only show the boy looking around an empty room with big eyes. All in all, Honey is a naturalistic child drama offering enough space and time for free associations and deep feelings. It's surely recommendable to watch it in a cinema. Although it's overall great done, you might not stay awake until the end when lying on a soft couch at home.

Went to see Bal after all the hype around the movie (probably due to winning the Golden Bear at the Biennale).

There were many problems with this movie for me. First and foremost I found the role of the main actor (boy playing Yusuf)extremely annoying. Maybe the whole 'boy who never speaks but whispers occasionally' thing should have added some feeling of intrigue on the part of the viewer. That did not really work for me as it was just annoying to watch the little brat stare in the distance 50% of the movie and never respond to any questions whatsoever / never interact with anybody. The pacing of the movie was painfully slow. I have nothing against movies where not a lot happens but this was just across the line of where entertainment ends and torture begins. Also the supposed 'symbolism' wasn't able to catch my interest (disappearing honey oh how witty never ever heard about the whole men vs. nature bs before). However, if you liked the movie 'Stellet Licht' (which I found to be nearly equally bad as this one) then you may also like Bal but why anybody would do so is beyond my comprehension....

As an occasional movie watcher, I decided to see this film after it received the Golden Bear. As a Turkish watcher, I realized many defects about the film. First of all, the father, and especially, the mother of Yusuf does not look and speak like natives of Black Sea region where the film was taken. They speak Turkish without any accent which came to me very unpleasing from the beginning. We realize the difference very clearly when the mother takes Yusuf to an older neighbor to take care of him before she goes to search his husband. The neighbor is a native of Black Sea region and speaks Turkish with a flawless Black Sea accent. Another problem in the film was that Yusuf can sometimes read and sometimes not. He can sometimes speak and sometimes not. I have not heard any illness as 'sometimes speaking and sometimes not'. What is the point in it? It was very annoying to me and the whole plot was about that. There was no particular subject. The scenes are very long and dark as if it were an horror movie but it was not. Maybe they tried to create another Haley Joel Osment but without any acting and concrete plot you can not do that. In my opinion, it is a very boring film. I really wonder how it received the Golden Bear.

Although I'd really love to do some promotion for this movie, it's a bit hard to do so. At least I can't recommend it to "normal movie viewers". This is definitively not your regular, entertaining popcorn flick that you can go and watch with your buddies on a Saturday evening before you start your tour through the bars. It's even not the right movie to drag your new girlfriend to in my opinion. There IS a chance, that she will like this kind of arty stuff, but there's a bigger chance that she won't. OK, let's unfold this a little bit. What I liked about this movie is, that it's painting quite an interesting portrait of the pristine "Karadeniz" people in (north) Turkey. But then again: This could have been done in a much more original way. The few introduced characters are too simple for my taste and they don't feel real. I'm a Turk myself and I have travelled many places in Turkey ... and for me it just doesn't add up to a realistic picture. Some of the shown landscapes and locations are really gorgeous and fantastic - that's for sure. But most of the time I couldn't shake off this feeling that I'm watching a terribly slow slideshow of somebodies last summer vacation. The story is thin and fuzzy ... I really wanted to like this film. And I also don't think that I'm an idiot who "just didn't see the point". If you have read other (positive) reviews about "Bal" before, let me tell you: Yes, it is a moving story of a child and his father. But it's also a VERY VERY slowly moving story. In fact sometimes it's hard to tell if anything on the screen is moving at all. For minutes. And minutes. That's not my understanding of entertainment or how movies should be done. This could have been a great short movie. 15 or 20 minutes. Maybe 30. Enough time to tell everything that was important in this movie in my eyes. I went to a theatre here in Germany to see "Bal" - together with my parents (my father is 73, my mother is 62 - And I'm 35). We were all more than willing to give this film a chance. My father was even a little bit angry when some woman left the movie after half an hour or so. But when the credits finally rolled in we made our jokes about how clever that woman was - leaving in time. OK, so why did I give it 5 stars? Here's my explanation: 1 Star goes for the nice locations and some of the impressive pictures. The second star would be for making a movie about a slowly vanishing lifestyle and habitat. And the last two stars are for the two tears I secretly shed during the film (one during the scene where Yusuf finally get's his award for reading and the other one when he's drinking his milk to cheer up his mother). The fifth star is there because I'm a Turk and I don't want to feel like traitor. ;-) No, honestly. Many people really seemed to enjoy and love this movie. I'm just stating that it's not quite my cup of tea. BUT... If you also tend to be bored easily, prefer entertaining movies over arty dramas and if you think that a movie is called like that because it has constant movement in it ... then this movie is probably not for you. On the other hand: It has won an important award in Germany and it's definitively something different. If you're unsure, you should wait until it's out on DVD or Bluray so you can skip the long scenes if needed.