You're listening to season 11 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 11.11, Rain's man, and we're your hosts. I'm Tom, and if I were in charge of the colony weather computer, I would simply make it rain every day.
And I'm Nina, new to G Gundam and was not expecting the show to turn into a romantic drama, but I'm here for it as an ad free independent podcast. Mobile Suit Breakdown is buoyed and bolstered by our paying subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest patrons, Kezia D, Adam P. And Richard C. You keep us Genki.
This week we're covering g Gundam episode 11, Ame no Saikai falling Rain or A Reunion in the Rain Falling Rain Originally broadcast on July 1, 1994. Episode 11 was storyboarded by Yoshinaga Naoyuki, his first contribution to G Gundam and one of only two episodes he would work on. He started his career working on Sunrise mecha anime like Ideon and Fang of the Sun Dogrum, but In the early 80s he started working on the anime adaptation of Takahashi Rumiko's Urusei Yatsura and then got his first opportunity to direct in 87 on another Takahashi adaptation, Meizone Ikoku. He must have hit it off with Urusei Yatsura Chief Director Oshii Mamoru, because he appeared in a cameo role in Oshii's live action debut the Red Spectacles in 87 before being tapped to replace Oshii as director on the last of the original Patlabor ovas. He then continued on as chief director for the Patlabor On TV series and the Patlabor New Files OVA series in the early 90s. Immediately after G, he directed the OVAs for irresponsible Captain Tyler and worked steadily up until the early 2000s when he appears to have retired after co directing the three episode Bubblegum Crisis spin off Parasite Dolls. Now the Play by Play. Previously on es. The world fights when she abandoned him to join Neo Japan's top secret Hunt for the Devil Gundam Rein Mikamura never expected to see her college boyfriend say it again. But after a chance reunion during a mission in Istan, the Neo Turkish wrestler and mechanical engineer challenged everything she thought she knew about life, love and medicine. But just as their old passions began to stir anew, Raine discovered Sayit's dark secret. Domon's sinister brother Kyoji had infected him with Terminal Evil robot disease. When she tried to treat his condition, the Devil Gundam cells inside Seit took control of his body and forced him to attack. Meanwhile, during his investigation of the Minaret Gundam, Domon discovered proof of Sayit's even darker secret. Not only is he Neo Turkey's Gundam Fighter, but the rumors about his deadly rampage through Istanbul are true. Domon rushed back to the hotel to warn Rain, but found her calmly clearing up medical supplies damaged during Sayet's fit as though nothing had happened. Rain still believed she could treat Sayet's disease, but the military police were closing in, and Sayit was forced to draw them away from the hotel in order to protect his love. But Domon couldn't let him go. As Gundam clashed with Gundam, Raine was forced to reveal the shocking truth behind her decision to drop out of Colony University. Will Sayit ever wake up from his coma? Has his evil robot disease really been cured? Will Domon and Raine be able to overcome the pain of the past? All this and more will be revealed as the world fights. So I thought of a good research piece you could do this week, and I think it's right up your alley, too. Oh, well. This episode draws heavily from the film Yol, which is set in Turkey.
Is it a romance or a horror?
Well, none of the above. It won the Palme d' or in 1982 under very dramatic circumstances, which I think might come up in your research, and I won't give them away at this point, but I wasn't able to find an English copy, so I had to watch it in Turkish, which I do not understand, and therefore could only really follow along a little bit, aided by the synopsis. But it follows a group of prisoners who have been given a brief parole, and they each return to their respective hometowns and experience dramatic events there. The emotional climax of the film involves a man who has returned to his home village to find that his wife has committed adultery. And there's like a sort of a ritual punishment thing that involves having to cross a really inhospitable mountain with the husband, like, going ahead of her, I guess. And then she's sort of supposed to prove her virtue by crossing the mountain. And in the course of this, there's an extended sequence of her calling out his name over and over again. And his name is. Say it. Which is where Imagawa got the name for the Turkish fighter in this episode. For him, the image of Rain calling over and over again to her former lover, calling out his name in desperation, brought that scene back to mind.
While this episode has a lot of elements of horror to it, especially body horror. The devil Gundam cells that transform a person's body into something that is no longer completely biological. There's overtones of sort of demonic possession, Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing. There's a very strong Jekyll and Hyde influence in the way it affects science behavior.
We know you love that biomechanical horror. It's your favorite, right?
Speaking of which, when they. I don't know why you would take video of people searching a house, but when they show the video clip specifically of the animal tests.
Floppy disk spotted.
Yeah. I immediately thought of The Secret of NIMH, which also, incidentally, came out in 1982.
Now that's a coincidence.
What a terrifying movie to watch as a child.
Was that the movie that came out in 82 or the book?
No, the book was in 72. The movie came out in 82. And this was an independent animated feature by Don Bluth. It's much scarier than the book is. But in spite of these horror elements and in spite of a couple of scenes that bring that horror back, I felt like the overwhelming genre of this episode is a romantic drama.
Mm, definitely, for sure. With a little bit of Domon doing, like, detective investigations in the background, but
that feels sort of incidental. We're not really paying attention to Domon this episode. We're paying attention to Rain.
This is an episode about Raine crying in the rain because of emotions.
And it's a beautiful episode.
Sometimes you get an episode where you can tell that the staff really thought they were cooking up something special, like they were putting their all into this, and they were right. It's a great episode. It's an episode that knows it's something special.
The level of detail in the background, the sharpness and expressiveness and fluidity of a bunch of the stills. It's Moody.
The sad saxophone in the rain.
I enjoyed the sound design. I enjoyed the lighting. And even in an admittedly beautiful episode, two things stood out to me, particularly. The first one being that every time they close up on Raine's face, they always did Raine's face particularly beautifully this episode. And I don't mean making her look more beautiful. She still. She looks like Raine. She looks like the character she is and has been through the whole show.
She's not been yassified. She hasn't been put through one of those Instagram filters.
No. But it's cleaner and sharper and the line work feels more expressive. They take their Time on it. They really want you looking at Raine's face and seeing the play of emotion there. And then the scene when she first runs into. Say it again. That image of the umbrella rolling down the stairs. The sound of it clattering so good.
And it could have come off as trying too hard. It could have come off as pretentious, but I don't think it does. Mm mm.
As with so many other aspects of the story, the romantic drama requires some suspension of disbelief from us, the audience. In the same way that the idea of Devil Gundam sells, we just kind of have to accept and go with the idea that Rayn couldn't call this guy and tell him why she had to leave so abruptly that he didn't have any means of calling her.
Well, okay. I would call this a cell phone plot. It is a plot that immediately falls apart once you live in a world with cell phones. But in a pre cell phone world, I actually find this very plausible. He's out and about. He doesn't have a phone on him. She has to leave urgently. You also need to forget that answering machines exist for this to work. But let's forget that answering machines exist
because they all have landlines. She could have called his landline and left him a message or written to him at the dorms. She can't write him a letter. Well, there's no email.
She was distraught. She had received a shocking message. She needed to leave post haste. And afterwards he went off to join the Gundam Fighter training program, and she was doing forensic science investigations of the Kashu Manor and evil laboratory.
My pointed questioning is perhaps conveying the wrong feelings because I don't actually have a problem suspending my disbelief here, because they're not telling a regular romantic drama story. This is an old fashioned like lovers separated by circumstance kind of story.
Ships passing in the night.
If Domon hadn't been late to meet Raine, she might not have run into Sae at all.
They keep referring to a God or some other being that controls destiny, controls karma, and that it must have a sense of humor to have arranged all of this just so. The God in this case is Imagawa Yasuhiro.
And Domon's comment to the guy at the cafe that we're all birds in
a cage, that that's a repeated visual motif in Yoel. It might also be part of the script. I don't know. I don't know the Turkish for bird in cage, but it's definitely in the visuals. And that's a callback also to the Birdman episode to Alcatraz.
It ties into a feeling we've heard Domon express before, that once his brother took off with the Devil Gundam, once their mother had been killed and their father had been jailed, Domon was now trapped in this hunt for vengeance, that he doesn't really have an option to do anything else until this is done. And to some degree, that every Gundam fighter is trapped within the cage of Earth. Earth is the Ring, after all. And then everyone, even tangentially involved, experiences some aspect of that. That rain is also trapped in a way.
And Domon expresses this again in the episode when he says, our mission is to fight and fight and fight until we've cornered the Devil Gundam and destroyed it. That is our doom. And they muse a couple of times on the possibility that things might have gone otherwise if it hadn't been raining that day. In the colonies, the rain is always planned out, and things seem so predictable, but they're not really. At any given moment, you might receive a phone call that upends your entire life. And on Earth, the rain is unpredictable. And yet, whatever God controls destiny arranges it just so.
I enjoyed the contrast between Rain's story about why her father named her Rain, that rain is this blessing to people, that rain makes life possible, that it gives succor. Right? Contrasted with the narration at the beginning about how rain can be a blessing, but it can also be a curse. You know, for every rain that feeds the fields, that feed the people, there's rain that floods and kills and destroys. Which is very beautiful imagery, but also immediately made me think of the recent Onion headline about how no place on Earth has the right amount of water.
Can you extend this metaphor to other things in the show? Because I think you can. I think in the course of this episode, we see another example of something that at first appears to be only one of the two, only blessing or only curse, but reveals itself to have the potential to be the other as well. Because at the end of the episode, it is the destructive power of the Shining Finger that cleanses, say it. And the Minaret Gundam of the Devil Gundam's influence, that green fire that purges him, comes from the Shining Finger.
I hadn't. I had not interpreted it that way, though. That makes a lot of sense. I know. We see him in the hospital, and his arm is no longer all infected with Devil Gundam cells. He looks like his body has gone back to normal, and the doctors are all looking over him very concerned. But we've also repeatedly been told throughout the episode that up to A point. The infection with Devil Gundam cells can be cured by regular medical science, and so I hadn't really thought twice about it, but that is very interesting that perhaps it was in fact the Shining Gundam that cured or partially cured him.
At the very least, it seems as though, in addition to its other very impressive battlefield capabilities, the Shining Finger doubles as the only weapon we've seen so far that can purge those creatures who have been infected by the DG cells. Against the Mummy, and now against the Minaret Gundam, no other weapon except the Shining Finger works. And that makes sense. We know that Domon was picked for this mission specifically because of his quest for vengeance. Rain was assigned to it because of her connections to the Kashu family and to Domon. Presumably, the Shining Gundam was designed specifically to hunt the Devil Gundam. And if there are two examples of things that are good in some contexts and bad in others, is there a third?
I mean, it's kind of facile, I know, but most things are good in some contexts and bad in others. That's true of most things in the world.
I mean. Yeah, but as a discussion prompt.
Rats. Rats are sometimes very cute and cool, and sometimes evil and infectious and dangerous.
What about DG cells?
I have a question about the DG cells. They make it sound as though these are highly infectious.
Mm.
But if that's the case, then wouldn't we just have living things all over the Earth, running around infected with DG cells already? Just from the Devil Gundam being on Earth?
Well, it seems like it needs pretty direct contact.
Okay.
Like it needs to get the DG cells into you somehow.
Okay?
It's not airborne.
It has to stab you. And he's not running around stabbing rats.
He might be. Who knows? I haven't seen any other rats in the show so far. Maybe the rats are all gathering somewhere, infecting each other with DG cells.
Plotting our doom.
Getting ready for the great rat uprising.
So what's the third thing that you
think the DG cells.
Oh, is the DG cells, okay, because they enable regeneration.
Well, I don't necessarily know. I mean, they do. That's pretty cool. I don't necessarily know that that's their purpose. This is not a novel story element, like as a plot device. The infectious biomechanical cells, like the infectious
evil biomechanical cells, just because they're called devil cells and make people puppets bent on destruction.
Well, okay, maybe that's a little bit evil.
But maybe if we could infect people only the right amount with the Devil Gundam cells.
Do People infected with Devil Gundam cells attack other people infected with Devil Gundam cells. Maybe the solution is that everybody needs to get infected with Devil Gundam cells. It'. Pox. Get your kids infected early. Then they won't be torn limb from limb by their classmates. Instead, they can all live in a future utopia where everybody has Devil Gundam cells and we're all cool biomechanical robots.
I feel like I need to get you to read the Girl with All the Gifts.
Is it about how cool it would be to be infected with Devil Gundam cells?
Kind of, but not really. What it's actually about is what if a small, small number of children infected with a sort of zombie fungus retained their mental capabilities or even became smarter on exposure. And because they're infected with this fungus, they don't get attacked by other zombies. And like, a group of people who are not infected have rounded up some of these kids and are studying them in an attempt to, like, figure out if there's a way to preserve that mental ability in adults who are infected, or if there's anything else they can glean. But yeah, by the spoiler alert, by the end of the book, these kids are kind of like running around in a weird post apocalyptic world full of zombies, but zombies that won't mess with the kids.
So it's a happy ending.
Sure.
I'm just a man standing out in the rain, calling out, kyoji, I'm right here. Come and infect me with Devil Gundam cells. One of these days, it'll be my turn. The thing I don't get about the Devil Gundam cells.
The one thing. The one thing you don't get about the Devil Gundam cells.
Yeah. How is it that they can control a person's behavior before they get to the brain? Because we're told once they reach the brain, that's it. No longer curable. They've become an evil robot. But sayit has these blackouts, he destroys large portions of the city, and you could maybe hand wave that as like, the Gundam is so badly infected that the Gundam is taking over and doing these things. The Gundam is piloting him, but he also does it when he's not in the Gundam, when he attacks. Rain. So, like, what's going on there?
I assumed it has started to infect his brain, but because human brains are bigger and more complex than rat brains, it takes longer for it to get to a point where it can like, fully take control.
Mmm, yeah. You kind of get that visually at the end when he's. When he's been like, engulfed in the Evil spaghetti in the cockpit. And the huge mass of tentacables has obscured everything in the cockpit except the one photograph of him and Rayn when they were in college back at good old Colony U.
Did you notice when she's calling out to him in that scene, he gets a new type ish flash across his face.
But I think that picture in that scene represents like the last untainted, untouched vestige of. Say it no last names brain. Like that's the one bit of it that's still intact. And it's only by reaching out to that part of him that she's able to get him to stop his attack. They make the Devil's spaghetti look extra plant like in this. There's the green background. Everything's sort of green tinged. And then there are those pops of red where they're like some bright red components amidst the cables. They look like thorny vines with bright red flowers.
That's one of the extreme body horror scenes for me. That as the person becomes more and more machine, they can merge with machines. Machines can engulf them and take them over.
It's just a hug. The Gundam is giving him a hug.
Speaking of hugs, do you not wish
to be crushed by the machine?
No, not especially. And I'm deeply disappointed that they made this whole thing of saying that Sayed is captain of the wrestling team and then there was no wrestling.
I have this in my notes as Chekhov's suplex. If in the first act you introduce a character by saying that they are a captain of the wrestling team, then in the third act they must perform a suplex.
Like they didn't have to mention that. They didn't have to bring up wrestling at all.
Or they could have said he was part of the Scimitar team.
One final, very silly design note his outfit from when he went to meet Rayn and she didn't show.
Oh, I love this outfit.
He's wearing a double breasted cardigan.
No, no, I don't think it's a cardigan. I think it's like a.
It fits almost like a bomber jacket.
Yes, exactly.
Because it's sort of. It has the tight waistband that's fairly
high, the ribbed elastic waistband.
And so the jacket itself sort of blouses out. There's extra material there. But it's double breasted and has either a suit collar or like a shawl collar. It's kind of hard to tell, but the. The way the shoulders and the sleeves look is much more like a. A blazer or a suit jacket.
Yeah, yeah. Given the way it sort of blouses. The right verb here. I was just going to say like billows or pooches out.
I think blouses is the right word. I wouldn't say billows because I think billows would imply that it's loose rather than gathered. Pooches also works.
It sounds sillier anyway, the way it blouses out there, it looks to me like it has the texture of, say, a nylon. It like crinkles and folds the way nylon does, not the way wool does. Like this is a space age fabric.
It's voluminous.
So my impression of this garment is that this is. Yeah, this is a double breasted, futuristic bomber jacket. Kind of like a bomber jacket. It's the convergent evolution point of a bomber jacket and a suit jacket.
And he's wearing it over a shirt and tie.
Yeah, yeah. To me it instantly conveys like Ivy League prep in the future century. Space age fabrics. More casual, militaria influenced fits. But the garments still have that like traditional prep look.
Dressiness. Yeah, it's a neat design.
Besides Domon, Sayet and Rain, the city of Istanbul is probably the next most prominent presence in the episode. There's a lot of Istanbul architecture on display. At least two and probably more different mosques. When the shining Gundam emerges from that one fountain in front of the Hagia Sophia, that's a real fountain. It is not deep enough to hold a Gundam, but it's really there. It's probably wide enough.
Many of the places that the shining Gundam have emerged from don't make any sense.
So, you know, it's almost always hidden in some kind of body of water. And so before we saw it emerge, I was really hoping it was going to be in one of the famous cisterns.
That would have been cool. But then it would have had to come up through the ground. It couldn't have just come straight out of the water. I mean, it could also have come out of the river or out of the bay.
But yeah, actually when we get that first shot, the Minaret Gundam surrounded by wreckage, but they do like a long vertical pan down to get to it and you see a big mosque in the back and then a river.
And the bridge.
It's not actually a river. That's the Golden Horn.
Okay.
The bridge is probably the Galata Bridge, which doesn't look anything like that. But it's also been destroyed and rebuilt five times. So probably this is like Galata bridge number 32 or something.
Maybe you should do the blog post about the sites of Istanbul. It sounds like you already know what all the places are?
Mmm, no. Because I spent a really long time trying to figure out which mosque is visible in the background there, and I'm not. I'm not convinced. Okay. The problem is it has too many minarets to be the Nurosmani. It has too few to be the Blue Mosque, and the wrong arrangement for the Suleimani Mosque. So we is probably meant to be the Hagia Sophia, but then it's in the wrong place. You understand my dilemma.
Do I ever.
I had to just, like, stop watching the episode and spend a bunch of time looking at maps of Istanbul to try to figure out what mosque that was.
I had to cut myself off because in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, especially during the scenes where they show the destruction from the minaret Gundam running amok. Wasn't there a famously horrible earthquake in Istanbul that destroyed a huge part of the city?
Oh, it's an extremely geologically active area. They tend to have major earthquakes, like one a century or something.
Okay.
There have been a lot. It's like when I was looking at the militarized police who they have running around the streets looking for. Say it. I was like, was there a coup in.
Was there martial law?
Right. Right around this time? And then you look at the history and it's like, okay, but which coup? You gotta be more specific.
But the earthquake thing also reminded me, going back a little ways to the episode that takes place largely in London. I realized long after we recorded, and thanks to a comment from one of our listeners, that before the fog goes, there's a siren that's like the old air raid sirens, that the depictions of the wreck of London are probably based on photographs from the Blitz. And so this depiction of the wreckage of Istanbul is probably based on, like, news photographs from one of those big earthquakes.
Hmm, could be, yeah. What do you think Sayit was planning to do with that gun, the one he pulls out? And then Dolman is like, don't even think about it. I already stole the bullets.
I wondered that myself. He's already said, you know, they need to run.
I'll create a distraction for you.
Is he planning on shooting the soldiers? And Domon doesn't want him to. Like, what?
Is he planning to shoot himself to make a distraction?
I never at any point thought he was going to kill himself.
I just couldn't imagine what else would be the purpose of having the gun and Domon stealing the bullets to prevent him from doing something with it. And then the next thing he does is throw the gun at the soldiers to get their attention.
Maybe he was going to shoot at them initially, and then he was like, all right, fine, no bullets. I'll just throw it at them. But why would Domon take the bullets? Is that just because Domon sees the site as a threat to, like, his own safety and Rain's primarily, I think,
as a threat to Raine's safety. Because the scene when Domon gets into the Minaret Gundam using the Gundam start key, which I don't think we've seen one of those before, have we?
No, it also helped him, like, find my Gundam in the junk pile.
He sees the photograph of the two of them together, right? And he seems alarmed by it. But I don't think the alarm is because he has just now realized that these two had an intimate relationship. I get the impression from the way he talks about them when he decides to leave them alone together that he kind of knew that, or at least suspected it. But when he sees the photograph, that's when it all comes together. That, like Sayed is definitely the Gundam fighter. He went on a rampage, he's infected with DG cells, and they have an intimate relationship, which makes Domon worried that Rein will not be properly on her guard. Raine is going to let her guard down around this guy because she doesn't realize how dangerous he is. And so when Domon steals the bullets, I think it's because he believes Seyet is a threat to Rain.
And he is. And Sayot has that rather poignant change of heart after his first sort of horrible DG cells attack, where he strangles Rain, he begs her, don't abandon me. He's frightened.
It's a nice echo. She calls out his name imploringly, and in that scene, he is the one imploring her. Rain. Rain, don't leave me. Rain, help me.
But then, after a little time has passed, he wants to leave first. Because if he stays, he's realized he could kill her. And he doesn't want that to happen, but also because he wants her to want to take care of him because of feelings. He wants her to want to care for him as a lover, not as a woman, as a doctor or an old friend and classmate.
His pain, remembering the feeling of abandonment on that rainy day accelerates the Devil Gundam cell's takeover of his body and mind.
And Rayn, invoking the version of him that she loved, is what pulls him back. Here's a question for you.
Go on.
Why doesn't Raine stay?
Like, at the end of the Episode.
Yeah. Domon asks her and seems surprised when she tells him, oh no, I'm coming with you. I'm still your partner. He blushes rather happily. And you know, it was funny. He had no jealousy at all at first when he thought they were just former classmates. But once she's putting this guy's health ahead of their quest to find the Devil Gundam, ahead of his quest for revenge, then he starts to feel jealous. But she gives every indication of having been very in love with this guy when they were younger and not that
much younger, like this was two years
ago, and that those feelings are not completely gone.
Mm. Okay. First, I think she is legitimately dedicated to the mission.
Yeah, I buy that for many different
reasons, including her familial relationship, because it's like it's her dad who is leading the Neo Japanese scientific response to this crisis. So there's that. It's the job of the Mikamura family to deal with this. They are deeply entwined with the Kashu family, it seems like, and have been for a long time. So there's that as well. But also, yes, Raine was very fond of her college boyfriend, but it really strikes her on that phone call when she hears that Domon has come back. And remember, Domon has been away doing his martial arts training for a long time. They were friends as children, but it's been 10 years since the last time she saw Domon. I think on seeing him again, maybe some old feelings quickened anew and maybe some new feelings developed in the young woman, Rein Mikamura. I think she might have caught feels at the same time that, say, it was catching Devil Gundam cells. Perhaps Love is the most dangerous infection of.
In 1982, the National Board of Review named it one of their top foreign films alongside Das Boot, Mephisto Siberiad and three brothers. In 1983, it was nominated for a Golden Globe in the Best Motion Picture non English language category. It was the Swiss entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 55th Academy Awards, although it did not get the nomination, and it won the Palme d' or at Cannes in 1982. Translated variously as the Way, the Road, or the Path, the film Yol is almost never discussed without delving into the dramatic story of its creation or the compelling biography of screenwriter and director Ilmaz Gune. Born Ilmaz Puthun in 1937, his parents moved the family to Adana Province, where they worked as laborers in the cotton fields. Once he was old enough, he also worked in the fields as a delivery boy. Driving a horse cart, writing short stories for a local magazine, and grew up surrounded by the Kurdish working class, a circumstance thought to have informed his left wing politics. His first article was published in 1955. He would have been about 18 years old. After completing high school, he went to Istanbul University to study law, but found himself drawn to the film industry, where he also had connections through people he knew from his home province. Gunay continued to write and to publish, and in the political environment of Turkey at the time, the content of his writing quickly brought him the unwelcome attention of the authorities. I'll quote one of the sources here because the phrasing is extremely ironic. In their biography page for Gune, the New York Kurdish Cultural center mentions that a short story he wrote about a person aiming for a better world was deemed communist propaganda. He stood trial and in 1958 was sentenced to seven and a half years imprisonment, a sentence which he appealed. In the meantime, the Turkish studio system and the film industry were changing. More films were being made that focused on social and political issues. More directors were interested in realism. Gunay's legal troubles lost him a job, but he went on to work as an apprentice screenwriter and assistant to a prominent director, Atouf Ilmaz. It was around this time that he changed his name from Petun to Gunay and started acting. From 1958 to 1975 he acted in over 100 movies and his nickname was the Ugly King. A friend of Gunny's, Swiss producer Donat F. Keish, said that by the 80s, Irmaz Gune was the most famous personality in Turkey. Along with Ataturk, he was the people's hero because he had played Robin Hood in a hundred action films. At the same time he was still writing. From 1959 to 1982 he wrote more than 20 screenplays. His appeal case worked its way through the Turkish courts and ultimately his prison sentence was reduced to 18 months. However, before he would have entered prison to serve that sentence, all judicial proceedings were interrupted by the 1960 coup d'. Etat. By 1961, things had sort of normalized again and he was sent to prison based on that earlier conviction. While there, he wrote a novel. They died with their heads bowed, which several sources described as communist. Clearly, he wasn't going to let that propaganda charge cow him. He was released from prison in 1962. He began directing in 1965 and was from the beginning quite successful. So successful in fact, that he was able to form his own production company in 1968. But his personal life was Something else. He started dating Nabahat Cheher, actress, model, singer and Miss Turkey 1960 in 1964, after they had co starred in several films. They married in 1967 and had what mutual friends describe as a passionate, tempestuous relationship with frequent, often public arguments. He was physically abusive and they divorced in 1968 after an argument at a nightclub culminated in him running her down with his car, putting her in the hospital for four days.
That really recontextualizes that whole scene in Yoel.
Yeah. One of the reviews that I read of Yul notes that the treatment of women in the story is pretty off putting to a contemporary audience and that it's really unclear whether the film is as written unsympathetic to these women or if it is aiming for a realistic portrayal of the treatment of women in Turkish society at that time. Gune went on to marry Jalle fatma Suleimangil in 1970, more commonly known as Fatosh Gune, with whom he had a son, Ramzi. Accounts from personal friends contend that he still considered Cheher the love of his life and that this caused understandable arguments and tension in his second marriage. There was another military coup in Turkey in March of 1971 and although Gune left Istanbul hoping to avoid any further trouble with the authorities, he was later arrested for harboring anarchist students and sent back to jail in 1972. It was during this period of imprisonment that Gunay would write scripts and screenplays with direction notes and send them to Sheriff Guran to be produced. They had worked together before as co directors and Guran's first director credit was actually for a film that Gunet was supposed to direct but couldn't finish because he'd been sent to prison. Guran went on to have a very successful directing career in his own right. He was extremely active during the 70s and 80s and his film the Anxiety Once Six awards at the 12th Antalya Film Festival in 1975, including Best National Film and Best National Director. And he was chairman of the Film directors association from 1979 to 1980, a role which got him arrested after the 1980 coup. Although he was subsequently released without charge following that 1972 arrest, Gunnet was released in 74 as part of a general amnesty. That same year, while filming at a crowded restaurant or nightclub, Gunay and his wife got into a verbal altercation with a right wing judge. A brawl broke out, a gun was fired, the judge died. Gunay was charged with killing the judge and found guilty in spite of the fact that at his hearing Someone else stood up and took responsibility for the gunshot that killed the judge. Thus began Gunet's final period of imprisonment, during which, one source notes, he wrote his most acclaimed screenplays, including Yol. He escaped from Imrali Prison in October of 1981 with the help of numerous friends. One of them, that Swiss producer Donat F. Keitsch, describes the escape like. With a team of people, I organized Ilmaz Guneh's escape, which was for me an act of rebellion against fascism. As in the film, we took advantage of a permit to get him out of the country. He was so famous that I transported him in the trunk of the car all the way to the border. The rest is like a novel. France had agreed to grant him political asylum, but to get to France was another story. We rented a yacht that we had to abandon in Greece. So I gave him a fake Swiss identity card which I made myself, and he caught a plane to Paris. Gunay was able to bring the Yol negatives with him during the escape. In February of 1982, to convince the Festival de Cannes to select Yoel, they had to screen it before it was completed. The editing had been finished in a rush, but they screened it without sound and Gunet provided live narration of all the male voices. The film was completed in time to be screened at the festival itself, where it received a 15 minute standing ovation. France granted Cunet temporary exemption from extradition so that he could attend the awards ceremony, and one source describes him accompanied by an entourage of bodyguards to prevent kidnapping or assassination. Another source mentions that he spent most of the remainder of his life in hiding to avoid extradition to Turkey. Although his films were box office successes. In an interview, Ginnay mentions that theaters that showed his films were sometimes targeted with bombings and arson attacks. The junta that took power in 1980 banned all of his works and according to one biography, after Gun fled, the film reels for his works were confiscated and destroyed, and even so much as writing about Gunet was forbidden. Yule was controversial due to its negative portrayal of Turkey in the aftermath of the couple, specifically the suspension of the constitution and imposition of martial law. But the film also included Kurdish language, music and culture, depictions of which were forbidden at the time. It was obviously sympathetic to the hardships Kurds lived through in Turkey and used the term Kurdistan. Yul was banned in Turkey until 1999 and as recently as 2017 the only versions available there had been censored to remove all Kurdish elements. In 1983, Gunay Co founded the Kurdish Institute of Paris with a group of other Kurdish exiles and emigres. He also started directing again and completed one final film, Duvar or the Wall, a brutal tale of imprisoned children. After its release, the Turkish government revoked his citizenship and sentenced him to 22 years in jail in absentia. He died of gastric cancer in 1984 and is buried in Paris. Thom gave a brief synopsis of Yoel, particularly its most relevant to this episode of G Gundam Points so I won't retread that ground, but I would like to discuss the critical reception to Yoel and to Gunet's work generally, as well as the themes that it shares with G Gundam. Yul received a somewhat mixed reception On Rotten Tomatoes, 77% of 13 critics reviews are positive, and Yeol has an average rating of 7.3 out of 10. One of the most critical reviews came from Vincent Camby, writing for the New York Times, where he seemed to think it was a decent movie, but that the hype around it had more to do with the film's politics and its dramatic production story than with the quality of the moviemaking itself. Quote a film whose political and ethnic concerns are likely to be equated wrongly with cinematic achievement. A film with pictorial prettiness but characters who are treated with such respect that from start to finish they remain as remote as strangers. Though Camby does admit his own cultural blind spots may contribute to his impression of the film, a 2016 article in the Hollywood Reporter ranking Palme d' or winners placed Yoel 65th, but considered the story of the production a better story than the one on screen. Style had been praised by American director Ilya Kazan for being truly Turkish rather than an imitation of American or European cinema. Though there's something deeply ironic in Kazan, of all people, praising a director who was repeatedly jailed for his communist politics.
Why is that so ironic?
Oh, because Kazan named names during the Red Scare and got a bunch of people blackballed and then took out an ad in the New York Times to defend his actions. A critic for Time, Richard Corliss, described Gunnet as a world class movie maker, and with Joel specifically, those who liked it seem to have found it very affecting when he saw it. In 1982, Werner Herzog described Yoel as one of the films that has touched me so deeply, like barely anything else in the last 10 years. It's just a masterpiece. In an interview, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inyaritu credits seeing Yeol at a young age with turning him to cinema. Writing for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott said of it Sweeping in every aspect. Music, landscapes, performances. Yohl makes most other films look puny by comparison. It moves the spectator to tears. Greek tragedy is no less sentimental, no less moving. Discussing the film's themes, one blogger talks about how the film juxtaposes transnational public transportation, a symbol of national unity, with the varied landscapes and disparate paths of the furloughed prisoners, illustrating the cultural and ethnographic diversity contained within a theoretically homogenous nation and the universality of oppression. Varied as the lives, backgrounds and circumstances of the characters are, they all experience oppression. They are free from prison, but moving through a world constrained by martial law, curfews, random checkpoints and inspections, and civilian searches. Another analysis notes that the characters are persecuted not just by their government, but also by the societies to which they belong. By depicting how the three heroes of the film are never able to escape their fate, whether due to the state or social pressure, Yoel shows how society and culture constrain the common man. Several things Richard Corless wrote about Yoel feel as if they could also be about G Gundam. That it depicts the restless boredom of confinement and the human idiosyncrasies of men under pressure that the freed prisoners find the country is a prison. In the world of the film, every liberating impulse is indictable. The subtlest smile on a stolid face can seem an act of anarchy. And each prisoner must find fulfillment by pursuing his dark destiny.
I can just hear Stalker's voice saying, each Gundam fighter must achieve fulfillment by pursuing his own dark destiny.
I'd like to end with a quote from an interview Gunet gave shortly before his death that feels relevant now. Relevant still. Forever relevant. When asked about trying to reach audiences in spite of state control or heavy censorship, and whether he ever self censored. Even under the most difficult circumstances in the periods of greatest repression, there are ways of reaching the people through film. We must always seize even the smallest opportunities. If something concerns our people, they understand what is being said to them, even when it is expressed in a fictional form. Next time on MSB, episode 11.12, Night of the Living Death army we research and discuss Genius Gundam episode 12 and pshh, it's only Earth. Floppy Disk spotted again with the eyeballs. Naruto Running Master of the Flying Ribbon. Dang, bro, that's rough. Wanna fight about it? Fusion Dance that sound. Could it be Tinnitus? Shoot me. You had one job and no one told me the Skeleton War would have mechs ready. Go.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unseated land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dayakhsun, the closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, and the recap music is window by 1000 hands. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com you can get in touch with us by email@hostsundompodcast.com if you'd like to support the show, please tell your friends about us. Leave us a nice review. Wherever you listen to podcasts or if you'd like to support us financially, you can do so@gundampodcast.com Patreon or look for other ways to support the show@gundampodcast.com support most of all, thank you for listening. Are you ready to come down to Neo New York and throw hands over your Gundam opinions? No. You lack conviction. Or maybe you just haven't heard an opinion worth fighting over yet. So how about this one from FS Scott who says Scimitars are cool? You might wonder why I included this fairly anodyne opinion.
Who could possibly disagree?
Me, that's who. The Scimitar used by the Minaret Gundam is. While clearly not a beam weapon capable of blocking a beam sword, it glows when in use and fades when separated from the Minaret Gundam. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that it functions like the Zaku's Heat Hawk or the Goof's Heat Sword, that is, it is a metal weapon heated to a super high temperature in order to increase its cutting capabilities.
So what you're saying is that's hot?
Exactly. Ergo, the Scimitar is not cool at all, but very, very hot. Qed. Come fight me if you disagree. They were giving it their whole no, I hate it.
I hate it.
I knew that would get you.
How long have you been sitting on that?
Oh, about an hour. I probably shouldn't actually include that in the episode. No, let me. Let me do a more good, more neutral transition. Let me do that again. But more good.
Translated variously as the Way the Road or the Path the film Yoel is almost never discussed without delving into the dramatic story of its creation or the compelling biography of screenwriter and director.
Screenwriter and director Loud car.
You want to end it there?
Absolutely not. I have so many more things to say.
Oh my God, but it's such a good ending.
Given how like it could maybe be the Bosphorus, but it's way too narrow. They'd have to be really bad at geography for that to be the Bosphorus. I'm pretty sure that's the Golden Horn, Sam.