NYTFF: Riza

Istanbul is a beautiful city for tourists, but not for the down and out. The streets are mean and the living is hard for the title character of Riza, which screened last night at the New York Turkish Film Festival. Painstakingly filmed by director Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, it might be an effective calling card for Turkish cinema, but not for the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce.

Riza is a heavily leveraged truck driver facing complete financial ruin. When his rig breaks an axel in Istanbul, the garage demands ten grand up front for the repairs—cash Riza does not have. If he can not make his next run, he will not make his payments, thereby forfeiting his truck. Desperately trying to raise the money, Riza beseeches his few acquaintances for a loan, but to no avail. Not that he is particularly surprised, given that his contacts are primarily business associates and Aysel, a former lover he walked out on years ago. Eventually, in a moment of panic-stricken madness, he commits an unforgiveable crime, which victimizes people even more vulnerable than himself.

The first half of Riza is all about the trucker’s desperation and the second half is driven by his guilt. In short, it is a festival picture. Slow and cerebral, Riza is not destined for mass audiences. Pirselimoğlu establishes his decidedly naturalistic vision through his grim locations, particularly the stifling low-rent hotel (more like flop-house) where Riza finds himself trapped in limbo.

As Riza’s guilt festers, he comes to resemble a Turkish Raskolikov, yearning to confess his crime. Yet his solitary life makes it difficult for him to find someone to unburden himself with. Though the stand-offish Riza is a difficult character to embrace, even before his crime, Pirselimoğlu labors to make him sympathetic, positioning the film in a moral netherworld where survival trumps all other concerns.

Challenging but somewhat problematic, the quietly deliberate Riza is a film cineastes will greatly respect, but they will have difficulty loving it. Along with several other films in the festival, it suggests a decided bent towards social criticism in contemporary Turkish cinema, with films like Riza critiquing the callousness of modern society, and others like Bliss decrying the violent extremism of traditional life. It all results in some intriguing cinema.

NYTFF: ARA

Confine two insecure couples engaged in various forms of deception in one sparsely furnished apartment, and angst-ridden tension is bound to result. Such is the case for lovers Ender and Gül, and their married friends Veli and Selda, whose dysfunctional relationship issues play out over a ten year period in Ümit Ünal’s ARA (Turkish trailer here), screening Friday at the New York Turkish Film Festival.

Given the unpleasant memories it holds for her, Gül has mixed feelings about the Istanbul apartment left to her by her grandmother, but keeps it for the revenue she earns renting it to film crews in need of a domestic set. It also makes for a convenient location for parties, romantic assignations, and other clandestine meetings, but it is a cold, loveless place, much like the larger spiritual vacuum the characters inhabit.

After years spent in Paris, Gül returned to Turkey, where she becomes romantically attached to Ender, who resembles a sort of Turkish Ricky Gervais or Jason Alexander without the sense of humor. His best friend and business partner, Veli, married Ender’s childhood friend Selda. On the surface, the two happy couples appear to be perfect friends. However, Gül suspects Ender is sleeping with Selda, which he is, while Ender suspects Veli has designs for Gül. Actually, Veli’s eye is wandering elsewhere, but they do share confidences that are quite intimate. There are many deep-seated issues undermining these relationships, not the least being a case of closeted homosexuality, which ARA addresses quite frankly.

Inspired by Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, ARA does not precisely parallel the play’s time-in-reverse structure, instead freely skipping back and forth through its ten year period. With nearly the entire film restricted to one set, ARA might sound stagey, but Ünal’s direction draws the viewer in quite effectively. However, several times he drops hints that appear to foreshadow impending violence, which in fact never materialize (at least in a physical sense). Along with an ending that feels somewhat abrupt, this impression of unfulfilled menace leaves the audience off-balance and somewhat confused. However, the brief clips of the commercials and low budget features filmed in the apartment interspersed between each scene, create an intriguing “if-these-walls-could-talk” effect.

Selen Uçer’s Gül is a convincing portrait of desperation and uncertainty. However, as Ender, Ender Akakçe’s constant bombast seems a bit off pitch. In contrast, Serhat Tutumluer gives a nicely understated performance as the conflicted Veli and Betül Çobanoğlu brings surprising nuance to the seemingly immature Selda.

While ARA lays bare the fears and anxieties of its characters, it is ultimately a more intellectual than emotional viewing experience. It screens at Anthology Film Archives this Friday, with lead actress Uçer and director Ünal in attendance.

NYTFF: Love and Honor

The modernization of Turkey is generally considered a positive development, but there is a dark-side to such social progress. The rise of organized crime would be one such unwelcomed innovation, as would the disrespectful nihilism of the next generation of criminal entrepreneurs. It is such forces that come to the fore in the very contemporary drama Love and Honor (Kabadayi, trailer here), screening Tuesday at the New York Turkish Film Festival.

Do not call Ali Osman a Mafioso. He was a gangster who ran his operations on his own terms, without the patronage of the mob or corrupt officials. A true man of respect, at the height of his power, what he said went. Eventually, he did his time and lived to tell his stories. However, he will not remember them much longer, as his mind is giving way to the ravages of age.

The widower Osman’s twilight years are quiet, spent drinking with old comrades or managing the charity soup days at his club. His best friend Haco can see he is slipping, but Osman is essentially resigned to his fate, until his past intervenes. On her deathbed, his lost love reveals he fathered her estranged son Murat before serving his prison sentence. At first, the annoyingly petulant Murat is less than overjoyed to meet his real father. However, when Devran, an unstable gangster obsessed with his girlfriend Karaca, shoots up their hipster club murdering the owner, Murat finds himself in need of Ali Osman’s protection.

Devran is a rabid animal, fraying from the stress of his unreciprocated passion and the blackmail of an unscrupulous racketeering cop. When he snaps, it gets ugly, but as an ostensible informer, he is protected from arrest. Finally in Osman, he encounters a foe who does not respond to threats or intimidation, because the former boss’s own body is fatally betraying him.

Şener Şen gives a richly nuanced performance as Osman. He is Keyser Söze with a social conscience, but Şen’s portrayal is completely humane and believable. Director Ömer Vargi shows a deft touch with much of the drama, playing down business like the Polaroids Osman takes in anticipation of his impending memory failure, rather than making them overwrought “acting” moments. As Osman, it is Şen’s film, but he has effective support from the Turkish character actors playing his old cronies, particularly Rana Cabbar as Haco. Still, this is not a Turkish version of Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster winking their way through Tough Guys. The stakes are high, but life is cheap in Honor, with the tragedy quickly compounding.

Ali Osman is one of the great screen characters of recent years. We never learn precisely why he carries such terrible guilt with him, but we come to understand him perfectly. In a powerful screen performance Şen dwarfs the rest of the cast, elevating the crime drama to the level of high tragedy. Like Bliss, Honor is quite an effective representative of contemporary Turkish cinema. It screens at the Anthology Film Archives on Tuesday.

NYTFF: Bliss

The UN estimates 5,000 Muslim women are murdered each year by their families in so-called “honor killings.” Their perceived crimes range from simple flirtation with a man the family deems inappropriate, to being the innocent victims of rape. The latter is the case in Abdullah Oğuz’s Bliss (Turkish trailer here), a bold examination of honor killings in provincial Turkey, screening this Sunday at the Anthology Film Archives as part of this year’s New York Turkish Film Festival.

As the film opens, a shepherd finds young Meryem badly beaten and violated, lying unconscious near a lake outside her remote village. He carries her home not to a sympathetic family, but a cruel step-mother and weak father, who automatically blame her for her condition. The village Agha, her father’s cousin, decrees that Meryem must die for the dishonor she allegedly brought upon the family. When she refuses to do the job for them, the Agha charges his son Cemal, recently discharged from the army, with the horrific task.

Though a dutiful son, Cemal has no taste for cold-blooded murder. Although he is conflicted, uncertain whether he is truly doing the right thing, Cemal spares Meryem. As they take flight from their wrathful family, Meryem and Cemal must turn their backs on their family and former village lives. On the run, they find refuge as crew members on the yacht of Irfan, a sociology professor who dropped out of academic life, hoping to find peace of mind through life on the water.

Clearly, Irfan represents the secular modernist impulse of Turkey. He is an educated man, who can talk to a former student wearing a bikini without thinking anything of it. Cemal by contrast, nearly goes into shock. A bit free-spirited, but no idiot, Irfan starts to suspect the rough outline of his young crew’s troubles and does his best to help them find their way.

The three main characters of Bliss are sharply drawn and well nuanced, raising it above the level of a mere issue film. Özgü Namal gives an understated, but moving performance as Meryem, a woman abused all her life, only now starting to assert herself after suffering an unspeakable trauma. Murat Han brings seething intensity to the role of Cemal, conveying the bitterness and resentment of a man forced to confront the injustice of traditions he had always uncritically accepted. As the silver-maned professor, Talat Bulut comes across as realistically flawed but deeply humane, rather than a caricature of nobility.

Oğuz and Bosnian cinematographer Mirsad Heroviç use their isolated locations to create some striking visuals. Well paced, the tension is quite acute at times, growing organically out of the story. Bliss is a film that needs to be seen by a wide audience for honestly addressing the peril faced by far too many Muslim women in world today. Even discounting the importance of its subject matter, it holds up well as a film in pure cinematic terms.

Seeing Bliss when it screens at the NYTFF on Sunday the 5th is highly recommended. The Fest runs from Friday the 3rd to Saturday the 11th at the Anthology Film Archives. On Friday the 10th, Ümit Ünal and Selen Uçer, the director and star of Ara, will appear in-person to introduce and discuss their film. They will be followed by a screening of Riza featuring a Q&A with director Tayfun Pirselimoğlu. Look for further NYTFF postings here in the coming days.