Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) - Dream that they've all turned into white mice and crawled into an eternal pumpkin!

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme twelve, part one - a film starring Ingrid Bergman!

(Chosen by me!)

It takes a bit've time to settle in with Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman in the parts of Dr. Jekyll and Ivy the barmaid respectively, primarily owing to the accents.  Neither is turning in a bad performance throughout the first act of Victor Flemming's remake of an adaptation of a stageplay based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, far from it as Tracy brings his usual hard-mouthed moral pillar with a gentler side to his performance of the good doctor with a disturbing preoccupation over evil, and Bergman makes her part as a would-be rape victim turned slinky temptress to her savior come alive with just how thirsty she plays the role.  As set-up for the film's later dive into a crueler relationship once Jekyll takes his serum and unleashes Mr. Hyde, their flirtations come across well enough... but the accents are still quite a lot to accept.  Tracy a little less so, seeing as American-accented leads in American productions set in Britain is a fairly common practice, and he strikes a compelling enough figure by simply being Spencer Tracy to make the lack of an effort to put on anything remotely posh easy to filter.  Bergman, however, is only two years out from learning to speak English for her part in Selznick's remake of Intermezzo, and trying her damndest to strangle her natural Swedish accent into a lower-class Irish brogue.  Heaven help her, it's not happening - she slips back into her usual mode with great frequency, and her constant seizing onto dialect snippings like "ain't" or replacing "my" with "me" do little except sound odd coming from someone whose screenpresence was otherwise so refined.  S'a thing you have to sit with and learn to accept across the nearly two-hour runtime, cause it never gets better no matter how hard she tries.

I focus so much on the accenting issues in this first paragraph because I think it's necessary to note the film has some uphill territory to cover before detailing how I believe it traverses the terrain like completely flat ground throughout the second act.  Once Jekyll unleashes Hyde and goes out for a night on the town, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde settles into its true intentions, and produces a second act worth praise all on its own terms.  Not at all what you'd expect with Hyde storming about foggy ol' London Town causing a ruckus in bars and making himself a disreputable member of the community (though the act's opening scenes do give you some've that, if incredibly toned down), the film is most interested in exploring how Hyde acts as a manipulative hand behind Ivy's back to cost her a job, isolate her from her friends, and push as far into depicting their abusive relationship as the Hays Code would allow.  Bergman stands as the focus character for this half-hour stretch, and weird accent or no she's doing a fantastic job of portraying an abuse victim in what feels like a realistic manner.  True, you still get the histrionics that can be recut as Fay Wray-style screams for the trailer, but her response to Tracy's mocking runaround conversations and mind games as he pushes her into giving him what he wants are excellent, doing her best to keep her composure against someone who's obviously harmed and violated her many times over even as he's dead in her face and she's on the verge of breaking entirely.  Scenes set apart from Hyde see her putting on a brave face for friends and tip-toeing around anything she thinks might earn her another assault, suddenly recoiling into a ball of defensive excuses when she can't hide the scars.  On Tracy's end, his Hyde certainly isn't a stunning physical or behavioral transformation compared to some of the more lauded actors to fill the part, yet I think him playing it as merely a crueler, disheveled Jekyll rather than a completely split personality opens the film to further exploration of whether or not his postulations regarding good and evil in the human soul are as accurate or bifurcated as he believes.

Fact, let's talk Jekyll/Hyde theory for a moment before digging further into the film.  Per Jekyll's outline in an early dinner scene, those aspects he calls good and evil are inherit to all, expressed not in totality one way or the other, but intermingling at all times, a little of each depending on the circumstance.  To isolate one from the other, express the evil in a man as a wholly different person from the good-facing side, should follow into the good living with a clear conscience and no impulse to do wrong.  Locked away from one another, one might even eradicate the evil altogether by giving it no outlet, no infusion of serum to bring its full force to bear on the physical world.  Course, as we know from Stevenson's novella, Jekyll cannot be considered a righteous innocent if he indulges Hyde's expression at all, for Hyde is of him, a man born of thoughts and impulses within his own brain, and if the two are to draw on knowledge and memories of the other and mutually regard their back-half as a figure worthy of disgust, then they must know what their mirrored self does and why.  Jekyll might safely say, "It was Hyde who did all those horrible things, Hyde, not Jekyll," yet he alone is responsible for drinking the formula that gives Hyde flesh, just as Hyde is responsible for taking the same to hide behind the guise of Jekyll.  Whatever Hyde does is an exercise of what Jekyll wants to do, and in denying Hyde reflects on him and continually indulging his evil side another night's escapades, Dr. Jekyll's supposedly pure half a soul becomes stained with every drop of blood Mr. Hyde sheds.  If, say, Dr. Jekyll were to continually unleash Mr. Hyde in the name of venting his frustrations over not being able to marry his fiance due to her father's concerns, and allows Hyde to torture and rape an innocent woman because it leaves him feeling better, then it's not really good and evil he's separated: it's presentable and unpresentable, only called by another, morally simplified name.

So!  All this in mind, why on earth does Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ask us to sympathize with Jekyll during the third act?  Despite all the work it puts towards locking our sympathies squarely in Ingrid Bergman's corner, once her scene of pleading with Tracy to save her from the insidious Hyde is over, the film takes a turn towards Hyde coming into prominence without the serum, has him murder Ivy, and spends the remaining half hour fretting over how poor innocent Jekyll has lost control over his totally separate evil side.  It's terribly incongruous, dedicating so much time and effort towards depicting an abusive relationship full of manipulation and heavily implied rape as something horrifying, postulating on how the rapist is not a separate person but the inherent desires of a front-facing "good" man, and then escalating to murder our most sympathetic character before acting like the murdering rapist is somehow still deserving our pity.  Worth noting, I think, the picture doesn't get into Jekyll's perspective during the second act at all, so we're left with a bland reassurance of his goodness without any attempt to explore why he unleashed Jekyll so many times, which can only lead to the worst assumptions about his person.  The whole thing plainly doesn't work, as the story only functions if you throw away everything we've been told about how the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic works here and believe Jekyll a tragic protagonist because he's the protagonist and so should be counted as tragically struck low.  What's more, in refusing to examine the why behind Jekyll's actions or condemn him for it, an entire ACT's worth of material I think excellently executed suddenly feels like a cheap, exploitative depiction of the exact same subject matter, because all Ingrid Bergman's suffering comes to is a quick murder and hand-wringing over how oh, how totally innocent is the man who allowed this atrocity!  Such a powerful depiction of abuse and rape denied a point beyond "Isn't it all so horrifying" does not gain from the absence; it only subtracts, and lessens, and yes, cheapens the whole thing by making it a commodity for entertainment rather than a serious issue.

I do so hate it when lazy storytelling taints an otherwise good aspect in a film with the taste of sand and ash.  I hate it doubly so when it's a film with such beautiful views of a reproduced Victorian London shrouded in fog and enclosed spaces darkened by the presence of a single man, a film with good performances across the board and chilling music and some rather nice if not standout effects sequences for the transition from Jekyll to Hyde and back.  Going with a zeroed-in focus on Hyde as a rapist to one victim has massive potential for a character study into the presumptuous nature of Jekyll and men of his like, but without a point beyond "Don't ya feel sorry for him?" all this good work adds up to a bad film.  The post-film conversation with Connie last night ranged for quite a while longer than usual as we debated whether the film deserved 3 stars for its technical and performative aspects, or 2.5 for its thematic failings.  While I argued in favor of the former for a time, after listening to Connie's perspective and considering it in view of my own history of assessing well-made films with major themeing flaws, I think the lower rating is only right and consistent.  If you're gonna do Jekyll and Hyde and expect the audience to stand with Jekyll at the end, either run with Hyde as a more typical force of mayhem and standard crime, or don't even try if you mean to go so hard on the magnifying-glass look at abuse.  "Man willingly unleashes his devils and terrorizes a woman until he ultimately murders her" and "Man never did anything wrong, pure cinnamon roll, etc" do not jive at all.

(The fades employed to transition between the two aspects are pretty impressive technically when you consider how well each successive shot matches to the next, especially given how many subtle little movements Tracy makes that somehow flow near-seamlessly from one to the next, but the part where they try to focus on his eyes by rendering them as a separate strip over the rest of the picture falls apart the second you notice a horizontal stripe of his head bouncing around independent the rest.)

2.5/5

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie (2008) - Vietnam DOES have a Bigfoot!

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eleven, part three- a film distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories!

(Chosen by John!)

(To be read to the tune of All This Time.)

Events of late make it difficult to say how one should feel about the main subjects of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie.  In fairness, Dallas Gilbert and Wayne Burton's conspiratorial mindsets should always make it difficult to determine the best approach to understanding them, for a conspiratorial mindset will always mean an otherwise amiable person is given towards myopic views on who knows how many otherwise agreeable topics, towards pushing friends and family away in the name of maintaining ideological purity, and towards twisting the world before their own eyes into something that will always agree with them no matter what.  From the documentary, we know Dallas and Wayne are (were in Dallas' case - he passed in 2016) given to these mindsets, for they admit it readily enough on-camera numerous times.  I more mean, however, that with conspiratorial attitudes taking over so many online spaces friendly towards the elderly in recent years, and with those views being so easily coopted by bad actors looking for an easily riled army to spread more substantially dangerous lies and calls to action amidst the Bigfoot hunting and the UFO spotting, the notion of a harmless conspiracy theorist is difficult to believe in this day.  Any one might prove the pressure point in an online campaign to harass the families of shooting victims, or fire a vulnerable population into protesting coronavirus quarantine protocols, or spread coded language to radicalize the youth.  It's difficult to sit back and believe in the notion of a harmless conspiracy theorist when even belief in Bigfoot is the merest step or two removed from something far more sinister, and with a decade-plus passed from this film's release and Jay Delaney showing little interest in cross-examining his subjects, I don't want to reflexively think kindly of these two when I don't know what the next few years brought.

Let's back off from the bully pulpit, though, and examine the actual film.  Important as it is to acknowledge a documentary cannot show one all the facts, what's on-screen still matters, and what's on-screen here does paint a sympathetic picture.  Dallas talks about estranged family members, Wayne makes it clear he has and continues to use threats of suicide to control people (something I'm inclined towards and find detestable in both myself and others), and both men make it clear they've staked their families' financial futures on proving Bigfoot real, but it's hard to think them wicked figures.  Given a stretch to talk about their mutual passion, both men speak with conviction and passion, and importantly a respect for others who show them respect in turn.  To Dallas' mind in particular, he believes in the Bigfoots he finds in his clearly empty photographs so deeply and dearly, it is more a matter of lacking faith in others that stands in his way of finding proof.  Such an attitude can read as sad, and for sure in a few quiet, solitary moments, he seems morose at how impossible his self-appointed task seems.  Yet from what we see, he's got his family, he's got his beliefs, and even if he doesn't have nearly so much money or respect as he'd like, what he holds is his.  Similar attitudes are evident in Wayne, who talks just as much about his attempts to continually better himself and accept his past failings as he does his regrets over those failings or his oncoming financial and legal woes.

It helps when Delaney captures incidents which incline us to understanding how easily others can takes advantage of Dallas and Wayne, foe and friend alike.  When Wayne appears on an internet radio program to discuss his theories and misspeaks about the timing of showing a photo to a dead friend, it is the host who seizes on the error and mocks Wayne to the point that his followers deface and doxx Dallas' website.  When Thomas Biscardi, a noted Bigfoot hoaxer cum hunter comes to town, the contrast between his hunts and the expeditions Dallas and Wayne undertake do much to frame him as an antagonistic figure.  These two older men go into the woods with their Native American words of power and their cameras ready to capture any moving shadow, the trip as much a reason to spend time with buddies as it is a serious attempt to capture Bigfoot; Biscardi drags everyone out late at night, plays disturbing recorded screams into the dark, and berates and belittles everyone who's not taking his mission to fool people seriously as he is.  The pair are plainly uncomfortable around Biscardi, and yet when he abandons them and skips town the next night, it is still a sad moment for the pair as their chance to work with someone they consider one of the greats slips away.  It's much like Wayne says in a roundabout manner during his (somewhat uncomfortable) rant against all political figures: nobody ever considers them as two old men chasing after something they sincerely believe in.  All anyone ever sees are rubes to mock or exploit or celebrate when they take a lick.

Owing to the evidently serious monetary strain both men place their families under thanks to their focus on Bigfoot rather than more sound routes to money, I can't quite say Dallas and Fred's obsession makes them admirable.  The difference between the mystique of sincere belief and taking it too far is the moment when you stop inconveniencing only yourself and start worsening the lives of those who depend on you. At the same time, though, their strategy for making money rather dispels a good deal of my concerns from the opening paragraph: the pair aren't able to see their blurry nothing photos cannot possibly make them any money, and so lack the dishonesty to fake them and exploit others.  Being victims within their own community who also use their mutual conspiratorial belief as a means through which to bond and better themselves makes me think, whatever happened in the years after this documentary, however the conspiracy theory crowd has become something terrible and ugly beneath the wing of the Alex Jones and Steven Crowders of the world, Dallas and Wayne have likely sequestered themselves away from all that.  I hope to God they have, for while Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie won't win anyone over for its filming or ambition or deep insight into anything beyond these two men and their little corner of Ohio, something in the cozy banjo music and amiable manner from our main subjects makes me want to believe in the goodness of their hearts.  I might not ever see what they see or think what they think, but long as they aren't out there trying to make others less or do harm to the marginalized, I'm happy to let Wayne live as he lives and wish Dallas a restful sleep.

(The Amazon rental for this film includes Delaney's 2001 short, American Dream, which interviewed Dallas and Wayne on the same topic and eventually morphed into this production.  It's nice to see it there, but it's also more focused on just letting the two of them explain their Bigfoot theories than talk about and live their lives, which is the main draw of the feature and not half so interesting, so I can't confidently recommend the short, even if it is only ten minutes.)

The Fits (2015) - Must we choose to be slaves to gravity?

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eleven, part two - a film distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

.｡*ﾟ+.*.｡It's exorcising personal demons time*ﾟ..｡*ﾟ+

I've discussed my difficulties participating in middle school and high school sports here a few times before.  Primarily as they pertained to the social aspects, bad interactions with my mental issues and hazing and bullying and the like. The actual running wasn't too easy either, tho, and I don't mean in the sense that pumping your arms and legs hard as possible for miles on end is physically taxing even when you're used to doing so day in and day out.  The part where you feel like you belong to a team, use the energy of those around you to better your performance and feed back into the loop with your own contributions was demanding for someone inclined to hole up inside their own head and define themselves as apart rather than within, especially when forming non-antagonistic relationships was already so difficult.  Even a sport so isolated and self-determined as racing requires an understanding of the self as part of a collective, which proved an understanding I could never fully grasp.  Never hit second gear or second wind or whatever you'd like to call it, never took any interest in what my teammates were doing, always felt stressed and drained by people trying to encourage me instead of boosted like I know they meant.  Really, honestly, truly getting what it means to remain oneself while giving it all to a team is maddeningly difficult, and I'm still not sure I'll ever be capable of putting it into practice.  It's a matter I'm always looking to work on, of course, for one must deal with one's devils in addition to simply acknowledging them, but when you're right on the wire, it almost has to be something you either tap intuitively or can't access at all.

All to say, what jumps at me most about The Fits, the directorial debut of Anna Rose Holmer and acting debut of Royalty Hightower, is how they use main character Toni's struggle to balance her old sport of boxing amongst boys with dancing drills amongst girls as a mysterious psychic illness sends her new friends into spasmic fits to explore that sense of individualism amidst the collective.  An early moment I found particularly telling is Toni's initial audition to join the Lionesses, when older girl and instructor Legs emphasizes the need to think of themselves as a unit, and lays out the complicated series of drill steps they're to demonstrate.  Toni, in a space she's not at all comfortable in just yet, and coming from a background where the camera and sound design have emphasized her tendency to obliterate all save herself for the sake of focus, dances about as badly as everyone else in her new group, yet takes the experience harder.  She's not able to engage in the locker room like her new peer, hiding in a stall to avoid others seeing her change while simultaneously listening in on their calls.  During practice, the camera often spins with Toni as its pivot point, highlighting how everyone around her seems perfectly capable of following the steps, yet she remains slightly out of time, tending to misplace or mistime steps, keeping a barrier between her and the group she wants to join.  She still returns to run stairs and work boxing routines with her brother, and during private moments in these exercises, she practices in isolation and seemingly starts to get it when she feels freer to treat the dance like a fight to be overcome, yet when she returns to group practice it never translates.

There's a fear of losing herself entirely if she clicks with the team, one her interactions throughout the film complicate through interesting wrinkles.  When the titular fits start striking the older girls, we the audience can tell each one manifests differently than the last, and eventually understand they leave no lasting harm, but they're still frightening seizure-like events that disrupt the flow of events and prevent Toni from taking advantage of moments when she's closer to getting it.  The uniform sense of uncertainty they produce, however, also enables Toni to bond with the two girls who take to hanging around her in calmer moments, Maia and Beezy.  Beezy in particular gives rise to many positive interactions, opening doors for Toni with temporary tattoos and ear piercings that mark a more physical transformation, and spending a night running about the fitness center in the dark during a rapturously shot scene, which transitions into a moment of quieter understanding when Toni helps Beezy after she gets scared and pees herself.  For Maia's part, she seems a quieter hanger-on for some time, yet shows herself as a more contemplative older presence, specifically as we move to the third act and Toni is able to have an honest conversation with her after the fits appear more sporadically and make the future of the team more uncertain. Of course, just as everyone starts feeling safe because they think the fits can only impact the older girls, Maia and Beezy have their own fits in short succession, and leave Toni more isolated than ever.

What's interesting here is how this sense of isolation plays into Toni's preexisting feelings of being an intruder in a space not meant for her.  In the downtime between notable events, she's often seen blanching at items signifying her welcomeness to the group - picking at the temporary tattoos, fiddling with the piercings before tearing them out, placing herself a subtle distance away from the main body of girls, pinching and pushing herself.  While her distant, colder relationship with Beezy after the latter has a fit can be read as the fits themselves drawing a line between those who've had them and those who've not, I can't help but wonder if Toni thinks of herself as having caused all this.  She shows up, and all of a sudden what looks to her like a cohesive singular unit starts falling apart and feeling afraid.  Even her own friends start acting distant to her because she's too aggressive and stand-offish before they experience a fit.  Her interactions with the boys' boxing team grow less frequent and more distant throughout the film, until she's looking in on their practice in shots framed to mirror her looking in on the drill team for the first time, except there's no more curiosity, only distant observation.  The things that made her part of this old world seemingly disrupt this new world, yet the new experiences here make it so she can't go back and still feel herself.  All the world seems gray, her ears buzz with anxious pounding rhythms, everyone seems distant, fit or no fit, and Toni just doesn't seem to belong anywhere.

So we come the finale, when Toni has her own fit, and it makes one question just how much these are truly negative experiences.  True, they're outwardly frightening, striking at random and producing different effects in each person, yet we've also inhabited the perspective of someone who doesn't possess the faculties or insight to understand what anyone who experiences a fit truly makes of it.  In Toni's case, when her feet leave the ground, and she dances the routine with an energy and individual strength not seen prior to this, we come to understand the experience as one of gained insight.  She envisions herself approaching the covered bridge where she and her brother practiced, shedding her gray sweatsuit to reveal the spangled, colorful Lioness uniform beneath, and dances in perfect time with her team in a variety of locations visually defined as her's throughout the film.  Understanding of the matter I outlined above comes to her for the first time: that it's not about becoming less to contribute to a whole, but about making a whole from many wholes, using the greater flow to build what's already within you, and expand the energy outward in kind.  Yet despite this revelatory moment, we don't see the aftermath.  Toni's teammates are still shown as intimidated by her dance, and when she falls to the floor smiling in the last shot, all we get afterwards is the Lioness hype chant and a return to the tingling, anxious music over the credits.  She gets it now, and will likely have a chance at building her friendships again, but do her revelations match to what her friends came to understand?  We aren't to know.

The Fits offering no insight into what comes next seems appropriate to me.  Much work as Holmer and production/writing collaborators Lisa Kjerulff and Saela Davis put into crafting a world where we can instinctively understand Toni's internal divide, the mysterious, otherworldly nature of her own fit pairs perfectly with what I talked about above.  The actual click is internal and personal in a way no camera or cut can adequately capture - we can only see the aftermath, and the film's conflict is more about Toni coming to balance her two worlds and be comfortable in her own skin than actually dancing as part of the Lionesses.  If she feels she's mastered it, and can show such mastery to others even in the midst of what they've come to view as a scary experience, then we must take whatever comes next on faith.  Perhaps I only think this way because I never got to this point, and remain uncertain whether I ever can.  From listening to the commentary on Criterion this morning, though, I feel confident saying the filmmakers achieved such intuition, and crafted a powerful film about the same,whilst exploring matters of gender expression and growing up in the same breath.  An intense, multitudinous picture, The Fits is bound to register as a profoundly personal experience for all who watch and remember the struggle of trying to be one for the sake of all.

4/5

Kedi (2016) - Cats know that people act as middlemen to God's will.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eleven, part one - a film distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories!

(Chosen by me!)

I should like to avoid melancholy while writing this review.  Kedi is exactly the film to get me feeling depressive in the watching, thanks to its documentation of the cats from Istanbul including numerous scenes of people tending to stray kittens and discussing their methods for dealing with death and monologuing about modern developments making the city less suitable for humans and animals alike.  It's enough to inspire thoughts of personal inadequacy and inability to handle a crisis, or fall into the depths of fear towards losing pets and loved ones, or spiral the drain of powerlessness at the advance of progress taking away green spaces and wild places.  I've issues aplenty readily triggered by seeing these sights, and I could very easily dedicate the entire review to a bleak, despairing outlook.  However, while Kedi contains these passages as a matter of necessity, in order to honestly discuss all aspects of life with cats in the Turkish city, it is not dominated by them.  The dominant mode is one of watching and appreciating and loving cats, celebrating all they do, and our role as their companions and caretakers.  If Ceyda Torun has the fortitude to film and edit and present such sad sights, I have the emotional strength to discuss her movie as its own thing, an even piece of documentation whose highs are equally worth discussing as its lows.

What makes Kedi so special a film, worthy your consideration beyond offering eighty minutes of cats running around doing their thing?  Universality, I think.  Between the structure built around a glimpse into the daily lives of seven different cats throughout the city with plenty breaks to trace the non-central players as well, the interviews with the people most familiar with these four-legged inhabitants, and the wide scope Torun and her crew trace across Istanbul, Kedi imparts a strong sense of kindred spirithood across the distance.  Of finding feline personalities similar to those we know wherever we are, of applying personhood to the cats and thinking of them as we would any other neighbor, of feeling an ethical obligation to ensure their health and safety, of balancing the scales between getting so little in return for so much effort and understanding the nuances of their affection for mutual benefit.  Cliched (and untrue if we're honest) as it remains to call love for cats or any other companion animal the one global constant across all cultures and walks of life, the film is inclined to make anyone who loves cats believe the idea by virtue of showing us so much.  A man breaking off an interview to take an injured kitten to the vet for emergency help, a woman with depressive issues talking about how caring for the alleycats in her neighborhood proves therapeutic, a sailor alternately discussing the history of cats in Istanbul and wondering at their supernatural side, numerous off-screen narrations describing the personalities they find in the local psychopath and the ladies' cat and the social butterfly and the conniving thief - amidst it all, you're liable to stop and say, "Hey, I've known/know a cat like that!" or else, "I've done that/thought like this before!" and the distance between you and Istanbul becomes a vacuum and collapses instantly.  Might not work for everyone, but it certainly worked for the whole watch party last night, and worked constantly.

There is, I've seen, some debate as to whether the inclusion of the human interview segments dilutes the film any, takes away from the potential of a work purely dedicated to watching the cats go about their business free from interpreting voices.  Being as great a lover of purity in form as I am, I can definitely see the argument, and think it has merit.  After all, the universal appeal of cats is quite obvious on the face of it, just by how utterly dominant videos of the same have been in the culture before even the internet - America's Funniest Home Videos and the like.  It would doubtless make a wonderful meditative experience, the only voice the silent word of the camera operators and editors as they guide us through the streets from a cat's eye view.  In total, though, I think the imposition worth it, for the simple reason that verbalizing the humanity the human residents find in the cats is probably the most potent idea Torun advances through Kedi.  To find human traits in the non-human animal is, of course, a quirk of the human condition, a somewhat ridiculous extension of useful traits that proved adaptive to survival many millennia ago.  We all do it, though, because lifelong/generational proximity is bound to engender such thinking patterns, and while we might agree this or that cat has this or that personality from simply watching, part of the point is that vacuum collapse, and one feels certain in their thinking far better if another speaks and confirms yes, I do think this cat is a little clingy, or a bit of a troublemaker, or very suave for a cat.  In effect, we need the humanity of the people as they commentate on the humanity of the cats to find the commonality across it all just a little bit clearer.

You run the risk of losing common agreement when you go the tone poem route, and despite thinking cats excellent subjects for a tone poem, I do not think Torun's vision for Kedi runs down that route.  It is not merely about the cats of Istanbul, but the cats of Istanbul, and the people of Istanbul, and modern Istanbul itself, as viewed through the frame of cats.  You could focus on them exclusively and count on the resonance of the city and its movements in the background to communicate the same ideas, or you could keep it all in frame and find the unifying whole with an unusual subject at the forefront.  Either choice works, since cats are cats and lovely subjects all the same, but Kedi is only Kedi if the people vocalize alongside their less verbal furry friends, in the same way I only feel right discussing the film in total effect rather than drilling into what strikes me hardest about the watching experience.  It's fine and good to take a single idea and squeeze it until all potential is wrung and a paint can be derived from its contents with which you paint the whole canvas.  It's perhaps more worthwhile (and in my case, healthier) to draw from many sources, and coat the canvas with all you can acquire.  Striking though a solid color block be, the total picture of life best emerges when you consider the joy of a cat leaping from ground to roof in a single bound alongside the human who marvels at their superhuman power, and the lamentations at how they can't do more for the less fortunate.  It's all necessary to get what's going on.

(I do so love Gamsız and his little sideways knock.  Hope he and all the other cats are still doing fine four years on.)