Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Yunan’ Review: Far From Home, an Exiled Middle Eastern Writer Seeks Serenity in a Windblown Mood Piece
You can see why Munir, a soul-sick writer from an unspecified country in the Middle East, chooses Germany’s remote Hallig Islands as the place to end it all. The soft, watery landscape serves as a suitably calm and scenic backdrop to one’s final days on earth, though it’s not so spectacular or stimulating as to give you a new lease on life altogether. Not at first, anyway. But in the course of Ameer Fakher Eldin’s poetic, existential drama “Yunan,” Munir does gradually find more to the place — and, in turn, to his own life — than initially meets the eye. As a mellow, slow-burning study of cross-cultural human connection, the film is quietly rewarding; a folkloric parallel strand, mapping the protagonist’s journey onto his native heritage, is less successful.
Premiering in competition at the Berlinale, “Yunan” is the second entry in Fakher Eldin’s “Homeland” project, a planned trilogy of films on the subject of displacement — the first of which, his well-received debut “The Stranger,” was Palestine’s international Oscar submission in 2021. Slightly less immaculate than that film, but still exhibiting impressive formal control and emotional heft, Fakher Eldin’s sophomore feature is an aptly multi-continental co-production (Palestine, Jordan, Canada, Germany, Italy and France all have a stake in it) carried by a plangent yearning for home, or at least belonging, from foreign shores.
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Born in Ukraine to Palestinian and Syrian parents, and now based in Hamburg, the 33-year-old Fakher Eldin clearly has a personal affinity with the placelessness felt by his protagonist — also a Hamburg resident, and lonely in ways that are swiftly established in the film’s opening scenes. Played by Lebanese actor Georges Khabbaz with a heavy gait and a perennially weary long-distance gaze, Munir is introduced sitting glumly in a doctor’s office, where nothing specific is diagnosed beyond a general, full-body-and-mind malaise. With even his sporadic shortness of breath seemingly more a psychological symptom than anything else, the doctor simply prescribes some restful time off — an order that Munir takes as a prompt for an unhurried suicide mission.
Via a phone call to his sister and his dementia-addled mother (Nidal Al Achkar) in his homeland, we learn that he’s an exiled writer, as creatively stifled in Europe as he is heartsore. Though his mother has little remaining sense of who she is, he asks her to retell a favorite story from childhood about a deaf-mute shepherd (Ali Suliman) living off the land in an isolated spot of desert — a quasi-Biblical tale brought to life in multiple enigmatic, bronze-saturated scenes, to which Munir’s imagination repeatedly drifts. Yet the story never progresses or builds: Munir’s mother remembers only how it begins, and these digressions begin to mirror his own interior stasis, a point that this already languid film underlines more times than necessary.
The film’s real-world narrative, while spare, is more engaging, as Munir travels by land and sea to the aforementioned Hallig Islands off Germany’s austere northern coast, and finds shelter at a no-frills guesthouse run by the elderly, quietly mirthful Valeska (Hanna Schygulla). He’s bemused by her wry, like-it-or-not brand of hospitality — not least in one amusing scene that sees her flirtatiously inviting him to strip off by the fireside after getting caught in the rain. While he’s more frostily regarded by Valeska’s taciturn son Karl (Tom Wlaschiha) and other island residents, he’s never quite alone enough to put the revolver packed in his luggage to its intended use.
In the latest in a recent run of unexpected appearances in offbeat auteur projects — including François Ozon’s “Peter von Kant” and Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” — veteran German star Schygulla lends this predominantly solemn affair a welcome shot of warmth and levity, her gentle air of mischief complementing, and eventually coloring, Khabbaz’s more staid, sorrowful presence. Though they’re the chief element binding proceedings to Munir’s native (albeit oddly nonspecific) identity, the lightly cryptic storytelling scenes want for such contrast and tension, eventually feeling like a weight on a two-hour-plus film.
This modest study of unlikely community found at the end of the world — or damn near close enough — gains a more mythic sweep as the island is faced with a perilous storm, expected to bring destructive flooding on a scale not seen in eons, and this ragtag crew must weather it together. Presumably with the aid of some subtle visual effects, the coming torrent is vividly and immersively evoked by Fakher Eldin and DP Ronald Plante, in inchingly gradual panning shots that take in the warring metallic blues and grays of vengeful skies and restless water, or high winds as they tear through reeds and rippling grasslands. (Kuen-Il Song’s alternately roaring and sealed-off sound design is an essential asset in this regard.) While the locals fret and hunker down, Munir gets perhaps the sign he needs of a universe bigger than he is, and a visible place for him in it.
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