Dry Summer (1963)

• Year: 1963
• Released: 16 Dec 1963
• Country: Turkey
• Adwords: 2 wins
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062322/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dry_summer
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: Turkish
• MPA Rating: Not Rated
• Genre: Drama
• Runtime: 90 min
• Writer: Necati Cumali, Metin Erksan, Kemal Inci
• Director: Metin Erksan
• Cast: Erol Tas, Hülya Koçyigit, Ulvi Dogan
• Keywords: husband wife relationship, turkey, summer, western,

7.8/10

Dry Summer Storyline

Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear at the 1964 Berlin International Film Festival, this melodrama follows the evil plotting of an unremorseful tobacco farmer who builds a dam to prevent water from flowing downhill to his neighbors’ crops.—yusufpiskin

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Dry Summer Movie Reviews

A parable of selfishness

A parable of selfishness set amidst farmers in rural Turkey, ‘Dry Summer’ is the story of a man who decides to dam up a small stream, denying his downstream neighbors the water they depend on for their crops. You see, the spring it comes from is on his property, and he wants to insure his own fields get the water they need. Meanwhile, his younger brother objects, but doesn’t press the point. He’s in love with a beautiful young woman, and is talked into forcing the issue of marriage over her mother’s desire to wait by guess who, yes, his aggressive older brother. This guy is a real piece of work, and he’s also not above spying on his brother making love to his new wife through a hole in the wall once she comes to live with them. He covets her, and the combination of his greed, lust, manipulation of those around him, and lack of any form of moral compass may remind you of someone (ok I’ll just say it, Donald Trump). Yes, that’s where we are right now, comparing the President of the United States of America to one of Turkish cinema’s biggest fictional villains, and thinking, hmm, yep, it is kind of the same person isn’t it?

The film really takes you to this place with its rugged, beautiful scenery, and the casting is excellent. Erol Tas plays the bad guy well, and Hulya Kocyigit is positively radiant as his sister-in-law. I would love to see more of both of them. The story gets a little monotonous, alternating between scenes of him greedily holding back the water on his neighbors to their consternation, and those of him ogling his sister-in-law, but it held my interest. By the way, one of his moves in the attempt to seduce her is to suckle directly from the teat of the cow he’s been milking, and fondle its leg suggestively. He’s a classy, classy guy, this guy is.

The film may have been even better had it been a little more nuanced, e.g. a scenario where him not building the dam threatens him with serious poverty, which would have forced us to confront in a more difficult way the boundary between individual and community rights. I don’t think it was meant as a symbol for real-life tension over water diversion either, such as those that were building between Israel and the Arab countries around it over the Jordan River in this time period, but it is interesting to think of that way, since conflict over fresh water resources will undoubtedly escalate in the future on a hotter planet with more people.

Be forewarned, there are a couple of brutal scenes in the film involving animals. (Stop reading now if you don’t want the mental image.) The one that stands out is probably the worst thing I’ve ever seen done for a film, and that’s the actual shooting of a dog. And it’s not at a distance or obfuscated in any way; it’s at point blank range, fills the screen, and it’s absolutely horrifying to hear the dog howling in the throes of death. His body is then thrown around a couple of times, just in case we weren’t shocked and outraged enough. What do you do with a film rating after seeing that? It was completely unnecessary to tell the story, and incredibly cruel. Director Metin Erksan should be ashamed of himself, and it mars what is otherwise a good movie.

Annoying

A Turkish classic, but, I must say, I kind of hated it. It’s obnoxiously loud, with every line being shouted or screamed, and the characters are either hopelessly dumb or mustache-twirlingly evil (literally: the villain twirls his mustache). The story concerns two brothers, Osman and Hasan, who own a primo piece of land with a natural spring flowing from it. The spring, which flows down to other farms, has always been a communal water source, but Osman, the elder brother, figures that he can become the most powerful landowner around if he dams it up and keeps it all for himself. Hasan objects, but, being the younger sibling (he seems to be in maybe his late 20s at the youngest, with his brother a good decade older maybe), he goes along with it. Early in the film, Hasan becomes a newlywed, marrying Bahar. Osman is a widower, and he takes an unhealthy interest in Bahar. After a tragic encounter with some rebellious neighbors, Osman convinces Hasan to take the jail sentence for him. Up to this point I can see that, yeah, in this culture the younger brother might defer to the elder in most cases, but it strikes me as unbelievable that Hasan, who, in any real world scenario, had to have noticed his brother making eyes at his wife, would agree to leave her alone with him for years at a time. The whole movie just bugged me on a couple of levels. The cinematography was really nice.

Great film

Director’s cruelty on animals, casts a shadow on his otherwise great film.