Review
CAIRO: For over a decade now, Turkish cinema has attracted the attention of critics and art-house audiences because of auteur filmmakers like Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Semih Kaplanoglu and Yesim Ustaoglu. In the last few years, a new generation of independent Turkish filmmakers has arisen, and festivals are hailing their fledgling works with some fanfare.
It should be no surprise, though, that popular cinematic forms like melodrama are still alive and well in Turkey. It’s interesting, if not shocking, that some relatively young filmmakers are using melodramatic conventions – comic book characters yanking energetically upon the audience’s heartstrings – to tell politically engaged stories.
From the handful of Turkish films screening at this year’s Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF), at least two of them fit well within this profile of politically engaged melodrama.
“I Saw the Sun” (2009), the sophomore feature of 40-year-old writer-director Mahsun Kirmizigul, is competing for CIFF’s best international film prize.
Also from 2009, “Vali” (The Governor), the debut film of 31-year-old writer-director Cagatay Tosun, is screening within the Festival of Festivals panorama.
Though its only prize to date is a special mention at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, “I Saw the Sun” is a significant film because it is Turkey’s official submission in the foreign language film competition of the 2010 Academy Awards.
The film takes up the Turkish government’s policy of relocating Kurdish families from eastern Anatolia. It tells the story of family patriarchs Haydar and Isa Altun, who are forced to resettle three generations of their family in Istanbul. Once the Altun clan arrives in Istanbul and settles in a conservative neighborhood, the story splits into three distinct strands.
One story follows a branch of the family fathered by Davut Altun (Altan Erkekli), who decides to pay the usurious fees needed to have his family smuggled to Norway, where his brother-in-law migrated decades before. Two of Davut’s sons have joined opposite sides of the conflict – one being killed after joining the Kurdish militancy while the other joined the Turkish Army. A third son lost his leg in the conflict, and Davut’s wife has since ceased to speak.
Another storyline involves Ramo (played by Kirmizigül himself), his wife Havar (Demet Evgar) and their six children. The first five kids were all girls but, just before the relocation, Havar gives him a son. Ramo is a good sort who looks forward to settling in Istanbul so he can send his children to school.
Before they can arrive, though, Havar tells Ramo she is ill. The doctors in Istanbul tell her she needs an operation – suggesting that her condition stems from having had too many kids from too young an age with Ramo, who is her first cousin. She’s hospitalized, leaving the kids in the care of Ramo. Since he works all day packing fish with his brother Mamo (Murat Unalmis), he must leave the kids to fend for themselves with their invalid grandfather. A succession of baroque disasters ensue.
Equally baroque is the third plotline, featuring Ramo and Mamo’s younger brother, a sensitive lad named Kadri (Cemal Toktas). Shortly after arriving in Istanbul, he catches the eye of a Cansu (Cem Aksakal) and the two become friends. Cansu is a transsexual who shares his place with several other transsexuals, whose alternative lifestyle choices aren’t appreciated by their conservative neighbors.
Mamo doesn’t like the idea of Kadri being on friendly terms with transsexuals and, to curtail his veering from the norm, he locks his brother in the house. Kadri duly embraces his feminine side, provoking nasty beatings from Mamo and, ultimately, the film’s climactic honor killing.
In its plot premise, and to a lesser extent its cinematography, “I Saw the Sun” emulates a number of earlier Turkish art-house films that have addressed the plight of the country’s Kurdish community.
“Vali” works with commercial film conventions, coming off as a sort of politically engaged action film, not unlike “Valley of the Wolves: Iraq” – Serdar Akar and Sadullah Senturk’s 2006 adaptation of the television series of the same name.
At the center of the plot is Faruk Yazici (Erdal Besikcioglu). In the opening scene we see him wandering among the sort of drunken revelers you find in any lively urban nightclub district. Later you find he is the town’s governor, and that he is not at all pleased that all this debauchery is happening during his watch.
Yazici tells his underlings that he wants these bars shut down immediately but is informed they’re all legally licensed. It seems the first bar owners paid for their permits during the previous (corrupt) regime and that provided a precedent that had to be honored for the others.
He holds a press conference to announce the bars’ closure and, when asked whether this action isn’t a tad arbitrary, informs journalists that he represents the interests of the decent folk who live in the neighborhood. The audience is later allowed to see that the decent folk who live in the neighborhood agree with him. Law is, after all, a human institution.
The villain is an unscrupulous, yacht-owning businessman who plans to launch a multi-billion-dollar, multi-national uranium-mining consortium in the governor’s district. He doesn’t do much but scheme and drink whiskey. His main operator is Ceyda Aydin (Sebnem Donmez) a blonde femme fatale in a business suit who resorts to sex to get officials on board. Needless to say, she finds the governor unreceptive to her charms.
Ceyda isn’t the only weapon in the boss’s arsenal. Early in the film, an anonymous brunette carries out a “Matrix”-style break-in at a high-security facility that sees her kill dozens of security guards and make off with some important documents.
The site Ceyda and her boss want to buy is a mammoth marble quarry where an engineering company has been doing soil tests. Conducting the work are some friends of the governor – Omer Ucar (Ugur Polat) and his sidekick Levent (Ozgür Cevik), whose relationship is more affectionate than one might assume usual among engineers. In any case, the engineers find uranium deposits in the mine. The governor will hold the land for the state but he must first have the soil scrutinized in Ankara.
The criminal capitalist sees to it that the soil samples never make it to Ankara, unleashing a torrent of grief in Omer that pulls his younger brother Sarp (Ismail Hacioglu), an aspiring soil engineer, into the story. He’s accompanied by his girlfriend, a pretty brunette named Ayse (Turku Hazer), a student of American language and literature who, in the way of these things, turns out to be something different than she appears.
If you’re of a sensitive disposition, and Turkish, “I Saw the Sun” and “The Governor” could induce paroxysms of weeping at the injustice of the world. They have their heroes, too, though the stories classify good and evil in rather different terms.
In the comic book world of “The Governor,” where every state official has a mammoth rendering of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the wall behind his desk, the state is obviously the sole bastion of the popular will.
The villains are the unscrupulous criminals, especially the ones with American contacts, who represent only their own interests.
Though not infrequently naive in its storytelling – the sheer array of disaster that befalls the Altuns becoming inadvertently comic in the end – “I Saw the Sun” resists such black-and-white representations of the universe.
Though much of the misfortune that befalls in the Altuns stems from the ignorance embedded their traditional upbringing, these traditional bonds are the source of their strength as well.
The family is dispossessed by the state and forcibly relocated, but the final voice they hear from the state in the village is an army officer who reassures the family that this land belongs to them and that they will return one day.
Indeed, this is precisely what Ramo and his family do at the end of the film, the state evidently having forgotten the relocation order and the armed conflict in eastern Anatolia.
Though the family patriarch dreads having to leave and despises the state – which takes Ramo’s children from him – the characters representing the state are all kind-hearted types whom, it seems, only want to do good. Though the Norwegian authorities are stern when they first detain the migrant Altuns, this state also reverts to the humane.
The bottom line that these films seek to impart to their popular audiences, then, would seem to be “Abide by the state. It’s your best bet.”
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