The Butterfly's Dream

We hear “God is great” in only one scene in Yilmaz Erdogan’s The Butterfly’s Dream, where it’s a background chant in a crowd scene. That note alerts us to the relative absence of any god or religion in this new film from Turkey. The film is a  nostalgic reflection upon a secular humanist Turkey, where freedom, generosity, loyalty and respect for culture still obtained — and are by implication lost in a Turkey which has forgotten the two young poets who are chronicled here.

The film is narrated by a major modern poet who taught our two young heroes, the historic poets Muzaffer Tayyip Uslu and Rustu Onur. Both are doomed by their romantic love of poetry but also by TB. But they have an effect, leaving behind a notable body of work and converting the aristocrat’s pretty daughter from jock to literature teacher. The boys’ teacher’s generosity, flexibility and personal dedication make him a far superior authority figure than the girl’s brutal father -- and the looming theocracy. The film has given all three poets a resurgent interest. A post-credit scene shows Rustu’s poetry surviving him, as he writes on his wall “What is beautiful is that we’re alive and one day will die."

On the verge of WW II the two young poets make bets on imaginary riches. The sicker Rustu is the more optimistic, finding beautiful ways to express bleakness, and daring to grab a brief ecstatic marriage before his wife and he die.

The title refers to the mystic who dreamed he was a butterfly and then wondered if perhaps he was a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. The heroes’ adventures take them from the squalid depths of the Zonguldak coal mines — which inspire Rustu’s play, Love in an Age of Conscripted Labour — to the heights of the poet’s avian identification.

      Director Erdogan — not to be confused with the current president — delivers a historic memoir that implicitly counters the nation’s current slide into religious suppression.