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‘Yunan’ Review: Far From Home, an Exiled Middle Eastern Writer Seeks Serenity in a Windblown Mood Piece
The second film in director Ameer Fakher Eldin's planned 'Homeland' trilogy, 'Yunan' is awash with melancholy and heavy with weather.
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. 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. 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.
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