Taking the show on the road to the present day, popular comic moviemaker Çem Yilmaz’s THE MAGICIAN (2006; March 30, 5:45 pm) features another pair of traveling players, Iskender, the prestidigitator of the title, and his best friend and manager, Maradona. As an enigmatic (to me) opening montage relates, the bespectacled pair have been at their business since they were kids, to the dismay of Iskender’s equally wacky dad. Now treading water at 40, the two must leave Istanbul on a “tour” after their sawing-a-woman-in-half routine goes awry (Yimaz’s expert editing gives even the hoariest gags a breath of life), but circumstances require them to share a trailer with Iskender’s feisty father. This Little Miss Sunshine scenario gets more complicated when they play a wedding in the sticks and the bride disappears in their magic box. As in many of the films in the festival, the woman gets the upper hand in this pleasantly loopy, often touching road movie, but the magic between the two nerdy pals and the loose-cannon patriarch provide the charm.
Ever wonder whether snuff movies like Saw are made in other countries? The opening minutes of Mustafa Altioklar’s SHATTERED SOUL (2006; April 5, 8 pm) seem drawn from the latest such splatterfest — umbrous, greasy images of bodies in vats and hung from hooks and hands in bloody rubber gloves holding big knives, the upshot being a severed leg found in a fisherman’s net in the Bosporus. Istanbul police inspector Fatih tackles the case along with forensic psychiatrist Doruk, but the leads are slim.
Doruk’s wife, Beyza, meanwhile, is prone to fainting spells and rapid-fire flashbacks of a traumatic nature, and she appears to have assumed different personalities, each possibly reflecting a different demographic of contemporary Turkish society: hedonistic good-time girl, fragile innocent, uptight religious fanatic, and her own neurotic, ineffectual self. Social/political subtext aside, the suspense and the thrills wane quickly: to judge from the film’s studied dimness, jarring flashbacks, and blackout cuts, Altioklar may have watched David Fincher’s Se7en a few times too many. By the time Fatih says, “Sometimes the answer is right under your nose,” it has been so for about 45 minutes for those in the audience still awake.
After watching a half-dozen or so of these generic offerings, I’d venture to say that Turkish mainstream features are not much worse than their American counterparts, and not much better. After the ludicrous psychobabble of Shattered Soul, it’s a relief to turn to the work of an auteur with a genuine spiritual sensitivity. Zeki Demirkubuz, whose Fate and The Confession, reworkings of Dostoevsky and Camus, mark him as one of the world’s few convincing existential filmmakers (he’ll be receiving the festival’s award for excellence), draws on original material in DESTINY (2006; April 1, 3:45 pm), a hypnotic chronicle of self-destructive but perhaps ultimately redemptive obsession.
Dozing in his father’s Istanbul carpet store, Bekir stirs to life when bare-midriffed Ugur pops in. She’s playful, she’s trampy; by the time she’s scooted out, bewildered by his laconic responses to her flirting, he’s in love. Unfortunately, not only do Bekir’s parents have a respectable girl lined up for him to marry, but Ugur herself is obsessed with Zagor, a Scorsese-ish street punk.
Zagor goes to jail; Ugur turns tricks; Bekir abandons wife and child to pursue her; years pass, as indicated by Bekir’s changing facial hair. By the end, a lifetime has been wasted, or transformed: the powerful final scene can be interpreted many ways. Genre films might gratify the popular imagination, but works of genius elevate the soul
