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Ice Cream, I Scream

We all run away!

By PETER KEOUGH | March 21, 2007

1.5 Stars

IT'S THE ICE CREAM TRUCK: Run for your life!

Far too much screaming, if you want my opinion. Yüksel Aksu’s broad and bumptious farce opens this year’s Boston Turkish Film Festival on an inauspicious note. Ali, a small-town ice-cream vender, tries to compete with the big ice-cream chains by advertising on the local TV station. When kids steal his motorbike, he’s sure the culprits are from the corporations, his paranoia fed by the village socialist who bellows out theories on capitalism and globalization. At other times, Ali thinks he’s lost the means to his livelihood because he has lustful thoughts about topless young women; this adds a creepy sexual subtext. Although Aksu borrows the premise of Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette|Bicycle Thieves and refers on several occasions to the late, great Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Güney, his own film is noisy, unrelenting, and witless. Maybe something is lost in translation, but I found the dialogue inescapable and shrieked out at ear-grating volume. We’ll all scream at Ice Cream.

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