With the possible exception of Yilmaz Güney’s revelatory Yol (1982), no Turkish film has lit up American awareness like this year’s Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, even though it has not yet been and probably never will be released in this country. Apparently a high-impact actioner that happens to make the bad guys American troops, it’s aroused righteous condemnation from people who haven’t seen it. Incidental politics aside, it looks to me like an average generic thriller, Rambo with subtitles.
You won’t find it in this year’s Boston Turkish Film Festival.
War and macho sensibilities do make an appearance with Ugur Yücel’s Toss Up (2004; April 2 at 7 pm), in which two damaged Turkish war veterans, one partially deaf and rattled by flashbacks, the other missing a leg and seeing ghosts, return to their homes — in Istanbul and an isolated village, respectively. The city guy becomes a punk, the country bumpkin becomes a drunk, and their increasingly hyperbolic distress finds no relief in the first-time director’s exuberant acrobatics with his digital camera.
For the most part, however, this festival focuses on the plight of women, their discontents and desires and the mostly uncomprehending response of the men around them. In some of these films, the male characters are as pre-adolescent in their attitudes and behavior as the addled, violent losers in Toss Up. But that’s understandable since they’re not even 12.
Like the two kids in Ahmet Uluçay’s Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (2004; March 31 at 8 pm). Bored with their primitive village and their apprenticeships with the local melon seller and barber, they try to devise their own movie projector out of a wooden box and discarded film strips from the dumpy local theater. It’s Cinema Paradiso without the clean old man, though there is a village idiot, and a femme fatale does play a role, an older woman who seems to despise one of the boys but nonetheless treasures his love letter. One sequence intercuts her reading of it with the two mini Godards’ discovery of how to make images move. Such eloquent, ingenious touches make up for occasional sappy lapses.
The age difference increases in Yesim Ustaoglu’s Waiting for the Clouds (2004; March 31 at 6 pm). In a remote village on the coast of northeastern Turkey, a lonely schoolboy befriends an old woman. She withdraws into depression when her sister dies and becomes mute except to call the boy by the name “Niko.” The return of an elderly stranger from Russia affords some clues to her mystery, which delves into the crimes and tragedies of Turkish history and into the nature of memory itself. Unpredictable and filled with humor, the film also has moments — the understated, devastating climax in particular — of heartrending poignancy.
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.
