‘Yunan’ Review: An Existential Mood Piece on Displacement That Deftly Harnesses the Transformative Power of Nature
In writer-director Ameer Fakher Eldin’s slow but haunting meditation on exile, Yunan, displaced persons can return to their roots only to find they never left. Nothing in the past has changed except their place in it: “You will be gone, forgotten. As if your existence was nothing but an illusion.” The film is driven by a performance of few words but much gravitas from Lebanese actor Georges Khabbaz as Munir, a novelist of unspecified Middle Eastern origin, living in Hamburg. The somber drama has a cumulative spell, intensified by its hypnotic visual command and an atmospheric principal setting on Germany’s Hallig Islands.
Munir is introduced in a doctor’s office, plagued by frequent shortness of breath that becomes almost overwhelming. The medic tells him his respiratory tests came back normal, suggesting that stress might be his problem and that a break would do him good.
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Calls to his sister back home reveal that their mother (Nidal Al Achkar) is slipping deeper into dementia. Perhaps hoping to find inspiration for his stalled novel, Munir presses her to tell him a story he remembers from childhood about a shepherd (Ali Suleiman) unable to see, hear or speak, who had nothing but a herd of sheep and a wife “as beautiful as the moon” (Sibel Kekilli). But his mother can recall only the beginning and has forgotten the shepherd’s name.
There’s folkloric mystique in the sequences that bring that tale to life, shot in Jordan in burnished earth tones. But they resurface more often than is needed, developing only toward the end as Munir finds his way into the story-within-a-story narrative. Trimming a couple of those detours from the midsection would improve the overall pacing.
After bidding a passionless goodbye to his Hamburg girlfriend Sarah (Laura Sophia Landauer) and entrusting her to look after his dog, Munir takes the doctor’s advice and decides to get away. But the gun in his luggage indicates that the writer has a more definitive departure in mind.
He travels by train and ferry to the island of Langeness, off the North Sea coast, a suitably remote place for suicide, with its glowering gray skies bleeding into the similarly dark churn of the waters on an endless horizon. The woman who runs the guesthouse, Valeska (Hanna Schygulla), brusquely informs him she has no vacancies, with some sly misdirection seeming to set her up as an unfriendly racist. But after Munir insults her and she demands an apology, she shows him kindness, offering him a no-frills room in a separate guesthouse that’s being renovated.
Cinematographer Ronald Plante’s graceful slow pans give eloquent expression to Munir’s isolation as he wanders about the green lowland pastures and frigid-looking shoreline of the windswept place. The 19th century German poet Theodor Storm called the Halligen “floating dreams,” which seems an apt description of the film’s evocative imagery.
There’s a pastoral serenity to the place, with geese waddling in a line and sheep and cows grazing, but Munir continues to carry his sadness like a heavy burden. In one memorable sequence, he jumps a fence into a field of jittery cattle that seem to watch him with both curiosity and hostility as he stares down a wary bull that looks ready to charge him at any time. Valeska’s taciturn son Karl (Tom Wlaschiha) regards him with similar suspicion, even as his mother warms to the outsider.
The islands can be flooded by storm tides multiple times a year, and locals have adapted to the elements, with homes and other buildings constructed on man-made mounds. But weather reports indicate heavy winds and severe thunderstorms that threaten a once-in-a-generation flood, prompting Valeska to shift Munir into the main guesthouse. Karl gets busy moving the livestock and making other preparations, but when Munir offers to help, he ignores him.
The scenes that follow — accompanied by the plaintive strings of composer Suad Bushnaq’s soulful orchestral score — are genuinely awe-inspiring. They show nature in all its elemental fury as waves crash over the breakwater and the sea surges across the fields, submerging the land. Drone shots of the guesthouse and farm buildings transformed into islands are spectacular, and whatever visual effects were employed are undetectable.
While the aftermath includes a majestic image of death, it also shows nature’s capacity for rebirth and renewal. As an allegory for displacement, for the lost sense of self that exile brings, as well as its eventual rediscovery, Yunan creeps up on you.
Much of Munir’s emergence from his funk happens when the villagers are gathered in the local bierhaus, their drunken carousing keeping him firmly on the sidelines until an impromptu wrestling contest, which shows he still has the will to live.
A pub singalong, in which Valeska interrupts the traditional German tunes to put some rousing Arab music on the stereo, yields one of the movie’s more clichéd scenes, as Munir begins to dance, slowly and heavily at first and then with growing vigor. But Fakher Eldin and Khabbaz by that point have gotten us sufficiently invested in the character to accept the use of a shopworn trope.
With his dark eyes and brooding countenance, Khabbaz makes a compelling central character whose reawakening, to both the actor and the writer-director’s credit, doesn’t exactly make him a new man, but lightens his despair and allows him to breathe again.
In a role that seems tailor-made for her skills — drawing on her iconic stature in German cinema while still making her a believable fixture of this lonely place — Schygulla brings warmth, low-key humor and wisdom that represent a welcome contrast to Munir’s weighty silence and Karl’s surliness. Valeska is the movie’s stabilizing presence, imperturbable even in the face of potential natural disaster.
Yunan is the second part of a Home Trilogy by Fakher Eldin, who is Syrian from the occupied Golan Heights and lives, like his protagonist, in Hamburg. It follows The Stranger, a well-received Venice 2021 premiere, and precedes Nostalgia: A Tale in Its First Chapters, on which the director has begun work. The new film has its longueurs, but it’s elegantly crafted and has a poetic intensity that builds in rewarding ways.
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