previously published on Asian Movie Pulse
Although Turkish cinema scene is more associated with mainstream art house efforts, its more genre-oriented pole is also quite strong and recognized globally. One of the newer examples of it, a multi-genre crossover “The Funeral” written and directed by Orcun Behram is touring the festivals since its world premiere at the last year’s edition of Sitges. Most recently, it was showcased at the official competition of Grossmann Fantastic Wine and Film Festival in Ljutomer, Slovenia, where it scooped the main Viscious Cat award.
Behram opens his film with a sequence mostly located in a hearse van touring the back roads of Turkey to a small village graveyard where a funeral takes place in the rain. Its purpose is to establish the character of our protagonist, the driver named Cemal (Ahmet Rifat Sungar, best known for his roles in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Three Monkeys” and “The Wild Pear Tree”) as a loner and a man of few words who possibly holds a secret. Soon enough, Cemal is approached by his colleague with a hush-hush offer he cannot really refuse. His job is to make a certain corpse disappear for a period of time, until the situation settles, so it could be buried properly, and the reward for his effort would be a hefty, but not unbelievably large sum of money.
Initially, Cemal is wary that the offer might be a set-up, but he reluctantly agrees. The corpse he should carry around for a month or so belongs to Zeynep (Cansu Türedi who built her career on Turkish television), supposedly a victim of honour killing done by her influential family. Cemal drives the van away, checks into a no-questions-asked roadside motel and engages in his routines of chain-smoking and solo-drinking, until he hears some not-quite-dead noises coming from the back of his van. Well, Zeynep is a bit undead and quite hungry, and, since Cemal develops certain feelings for her, he starts caring and providing for her, urging them to be constantly on the move, while the police starts the search for a serial killer. However, there is no safe place in the world for the two of them, not even Cemal’s native home, and the day of meeting with Zeynep’s family is approaching…
“The Funeral” is a genre salad of sorts, blending the ideas of the road movie, “necromantic” comedy, love-on-the-run, horror and revenge thriller and doing so in a pace that often tests the audiences’ patience during the (almost) two hours of runtime until the make-it-or-break-it moment for the ending. To do so, Behram has to exercise the full control over the material in order to converge the interesting ideas he has towards a point. There is a constant threat that the multitude of ideas would take the film over, but the filmmaker barely manages to hold a grip over them.
The first of the film’s strong points is the acting. It is not a surprise that Ahmet Rifat Sungar is reliable in a role of a cryptic loner, since those roles suit him well. On the other hand, Cansu Türedi is a proper revelation of the film, since the actress nails the role with limited means of expression, given that her character does not speak. The supporting actors also create a rich tapestry contributing to the second of “The Funeral’s” strong points – its atmosphere. The realistic bleakness of it is conjured in the drained colours in the work of the art director Tuncay Özcan and the cinematographer Engin Özkaya who also lensed the filmmaker’s previous film “Antenna” (2019). However, Burk Alatas’ editing could have been a bit firmer.
But the reason the film mostly succeeds in making a point is the point itself. Behram packs a punch against the inherent conservativism, patriarchy and misoginy still present in the Turkish society, but is smart enough to hold it until the right moment. However, marketing “The Funeral” as a purely genre experience does not do the film any favours, since it serves better as an example of a hybrid of a genre- and an art house movie.
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