The MFA's Turkish Film Festival opens with Zeki Demirkubuz's stark and deliberate meditation on the title vice. Who envies who, however, becomes clear only gradually, and the reason for the malignancy remains, as in the case of Iago, inexplicable. It's the 1930s, and Halit, a middle-aged engineer, takes up a post at a coal mine in the sticks and tries to settle down with his young and beautiful wife, Mükerrem, and his spinster sister, Seniha. Accustomed to the cosmopolitan distractions of Istanbul, Mükerrem grows bored with the dreary provincial life and her distant, hard-working husband, and she catches the eye of the callow, good-looking scion of the town's richest family. Gloomy and self-effacing Siniha, Mükerrem's confidante, seems at a loss for advice. As in his similarly somber Destiny and Fate, Demirkubuz unfolds this tragedy with the stately pace of the Albinoni-attributed Adagio on the soundtrack, his characters aware of their folly but unable to resist it.
