The Water diviner – war melodrama suffering from amnesia – Swedish YLE

Russell Crowe directs and plays a man seeking his fallen sons in Turkey after the First World War.

Joshua Connor (Russell Crowe) is a simple man from the bush in Australia, his three sons have fallen by Battle of Gallipoli and four years after the war goes now Joshua to Turkey to find her sons bodies and download them.

Stubborn and stoic struggles he went on, the British snaps of him and Australians think he’s tough. The only one who seems to understand Joshua is the Turkish officer Major Hasan ( Yilmaz Erdogan ) who think that they all could help Mr Connor, “he’s the only father who had come to search for their sons.”

The Water diviner is a beautiful film, postcard beautiful, as well as Olga Kurylenko , who plays the female lead Ayshe. Then it’s another thing to Russell Crowe’s strength is to play tough and hard, not romantic and soft. (The movie A Good Year of Ridley Scott should have served as a warning example.)

The depiction of the war, the brutal fight in the line of fire and pure classic action scenes pass Russel Crowe as a director of the splendidly. War is brutal and especially the scene with a slow death fight between shots the lines are touching. Death comes slowly when you are in the bowels of the hand.

Good also serves the depiction of time in Australia, the beautiful but harsh landscape where Joshua seeking water. A landscape where you do not survive if you do not also believe in hope. Especially beautiful is the scene when Joshua rides off to look for their sons and slowly disappear from a landscape that quiver in the heat.

It is in the portrayal of Turkey as the problems then begins. For this fall Crowe back on old-fashioned, classical exoticism. Probably the well-meaning but cliché-filled. Turkey and especially Istanbul, is portrayed as a city full of small alleys where small boys nimble feet rushing around, bazaars are filled with colorful fabrics and spices, we see dervishes spinning, we hear the call to prayer from the minaret and so Joshua Connor reads from Arabian one night. I mentioned this cliché?

But there are even more problems. The Water diviner is namely a film that unfolds in Turkey just after the First World War, talking about the tens of thousands killed Australian, New Zealand, British and Turkish troops, it shows the Greek-Turkish war now under way, but not a word about the genocide of Armenians.

It’s like making a movie about World War II that takes place in Germany or Poland in 1945 and then somehow try to pretend that the Holocaust had occurred.