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Wish-fulfillment for a burning world

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Difficult women

The age difference goes to the other extreme in Yavuz Turgul’s Lovelorn (2004; April 1 at 1 pm). A schoolteacher retires from his school in the impoverished Kurdish territory of his origins and moves back to Istanbul to patch up with his estranged family. He drives his friend’s cab to make ends meet and picks up a singer at a nightclub who unloads her tale of woe: she’s fled her psycho ex-husband with her traumatized young daughter and now lives in a hotel struggling to make ends meet. When the ex tracks her down and nearly kills her, the older man offers her shelter at his place and an ambiguous spark kindles. Is he the compassionate and steadfast prince who will rescue her and her daughter? Is she the embodiment of the idealism that has alienated him from his family and his life? Nuanced performances and subtle narrative turns save the proceedings from melodrama.

The women in these films are varied and deep, but unless the men are underage or elderly, they tend to be pigs. All you need to know about the title character of Çagan Irmak’s All About Mustafa (2004; April 8 at 2:15 pm) comes through in the opening scenes, when he fires an underling at the advertising business he owns. When his wife gets killed in a car crash, he doesn’t become any more sympathetic. It seems a man found injured in the wreck was her lover. So he kidnaps the guy and, in order to decipher the mystery of his wife’s desires, tortures the story out of him. Meanwhile, flashbacks to a Caché-like incident in his childhood don’t settle his nerves any. Overwrought, but with a surreal sense of humor, Mustafa seems more a satire of male hysteria than a serious drama.

It’s clear the women in these movies have a patriarchal oppression problem to deal with, and two of the best films in the festival confront that issue with startling results. At first Semih Kaplanoglu’s Angel’s Fall (2004; April 2 at 5 pm) evokes the slow rhythms, uncertain chronology, and immanent details of master Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. A meek chambermaid in a big Istanbul hotel rebuffs the attentions of a young bellboy. Back home she endures a strained, perhaps abusive relationship with her gruff father. In another household, a young man’s neurotic wife leaves him. The distraught husband wants to get rid of the wife’s belongings, and the chambermaid drops by to pick them up. When dad sees her wearing the other woman’s red chemise, he slaps her, releasing the underlying tension in a shocking way that recalls a more elliptical, enigmatic version of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

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