”Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar,” call out the dirty, grizzled men as they lock and load, eye each other one more time before likely dying, and begin to fire.
Iraq? Afghanistan? Syria? No: The setting of this suicide mission is the bloody trenches on the Anatolian coast of what will become Turkey, during and after World War I.
The canny and terrifying opening sequences of The Water Diviner, the new film that Russell Crowe stars in and also directs, immediately inject a sharp, contemporary relevance into a film that could have been a creaky historical artifact. The film is now playing at the Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street.
The Water Diviner follows the relentless quest of Australian farmer Joshua Connor (Crowe) for his three sons, all gone missing on the same day in the 1915 slaughter at Gallipoli. He is at first traveling alone, as his wife has killed herself in her grief. But he is eventually joined by companion and nemesis Major Hassan (Yilmaz Erdogan), who is looking for Turkish Commander Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in the hopes of helping to found the new republic of Turkey amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
If some of this appears to be an opportunity for heavy-handedness, well, it is, and perhaps can be written off to this being Crowe’s directorial debut. The central metaphor is a little clunky. Connor has a unique gift — being able to divine water with aid of divining rods — but as his wife says, before her suicide, “You can’t even find your own children. You lost them.” Other aspects of the film are perhaps not fleshed out enough, such as the role of the invading Greeks Connor and Hassan encounter in their journey; they want to join the great powers in carving up the former Ottoman Empire, and appear to be getting help from the victorious British and other allies. The film also can’t decide whether it is glorifying war and violence or condemning it. The number of new bodies that pile up, as Connor’s bleak search goes on, is phenomenal. When the Greeks capture Connor and Hasan en route, it’s no problem for Connor — who, having explained what a cricket bat is to the Turks — immediately uses it to whack the Greeks in the head in the nick of time to save Hasan from execution.
But the film is also marked by strong performances throughout, from Crowe, Erdogan, and Olga Kurylenko, as Connor’s love interest, Ayshe. And unlike Peter Weir’s fine 1981 film Gallilpoli, this movie presents the Turkish perspective on what the West calls the battle of Gallipoli. It very much has long-overdue, grown-up ambitions, like Clint Eastwood’s courageous Letters from Iwo Jima. Hasan’s presence keeps in your consciousness that while the Australians might have lost 7,000 men at Gallipoli, the Turks lost ten times that number. Similarly, Ayshe tells Connor that, no, that repeating call he hears out the window of his hotel are not someone trying to sell him something; it’s the muezzin’s call to prayer.
When Connor tells her he’s on his way to Gallipoli, she corrects him. “You mean Canakkale,” she replies — the Turkish name for the gruesome battlefield.
Which leads to the canny way that Crowe connects the story of The Water Diviner to the present. One of the Turkish officers tells Connor that he should “know where a country is before you invade.” And at the film’s end — maybe 20 minutes too long — Connor returns to Ayshe and sits down at the table in her hotel. She is free to become his new wife instead of veiling up, as her martinet of a brother-in-law has insisted. Connor, having been changed by his experience, orders coffee in the native language and tries to read the grounds, as is the native custom.
“You speak Turkish like a peasant,” she says to him. But Connor has passed some kind of test in Ayshe’s eyes. If there’s a sequel, a wedding with whirling dervishes and assuaging of Western guilt is definitely in the picture.
U.S. audiences will probably learn something from this movie. Surely not enough, but something about Turkey, Islamic culture, and how the past really does matter, as people remember who invaded them and killed their families.
Sound familiar?
