Kosmos – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jun/14/kosmos-review

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Tiny pendants of audiovisual poetry adorn this otherwise faintly impenetrable Turkish fable – about a thief with healing powers who arrives in a heavily fortified town populated by suspicious minds – but it needed a hypnotist film-maker of Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr's calibre to dangle them in such a way as to beguile us. Instead, writer-director Reha Erdem – following up 2006's rapturous Times and Winds – offers a Stars in Their Eyes-level cover of these arthouse heavy hitters: there are notes of Stalker in the film's abandoned, paper-strewn interiors, and of Solaris in its free-floating extraterrestrial imagery, and a hero who's part Irimias, the poet-swindler of Tarr's masterwork Sátántangó, part Peter Pumpkinhead (pace XTC). Munching sugarcubes for no apparent reason, lead Sermet Yesil makes a winsome savant, but his tendency to communicate with his beloved in loud squawks of birdsong proves trying, to say the least.