A Film a Week - Empire of the Rabbits / Tavşan imparatorlugu

 previously published on Cineuropa

Sometimes, life seems like an endless cycle of oppression and abuse. The powerful oppress those who are not, parents exploit their children, people abuse animals, hound dogs chase rabbits, kids bully and are bullied at school. All of that, set in the environment of rural Turkey, can be observed in Seyfettin Tokmak’s touching feature Empire of the Rabbits, which just premiered in the official competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Teenage boy Musa (newcomer Alpay Kaya) lives with his father Beko (Sermet Yeşil of Kosmos fame) in extreme poverty. Their only income comes from the father’s shady odd jobs, which include hound dog races with a live rabbit and illegal betting run by local gangster Muzaffer (Kubilay Tunçer, glimpsed in Nuri Bilge Çeylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Wild Pear Tree). He also runs a scheme with a school where he is principal: the students have to pretend that they have special needs, so Muzaffer can take donations. Beko comes up with a solution to enrol Musa in Muzaffer’s school, hoping that he could eventually get some state support for his “disabled” child, while Musa also has to take some "private lessons" in faking disability from Muzaffer’s daughter Nergis (Perla Palamutçuoğullari, another newcomer).

Misunderstood, neglected and often abused at home by his harsh, self-centred father and bullied at school, Musa is actually a gentle, noble soul, spending all his time saving rabbits from his father’s traps and taking them to his special, secret and safe place in a cave where he tries to build them an empire. Once he shows Nergis his ecosystem, she joins forces with him. But can the corrupt system be mended by the power of pure goodness? Could it at least be crashed?

Writer-director Tokmak comes from a background of filmmaking and TV directing, but also film theory and activism, which might explain why The Empire of the Rabbits is a well thought-through film with layers of metaphors, analogies and parallels painting the picture of a life in extremely harsh conditions. Focusing on the state of things, he deliberately relegates the story to the backseat, so the plot seems to be running in circles, slowly. Seemingly acting intuitively, based on the emotions of particular scenes, editor Vladimir Gojun eventually manages to establish some sense of continuity and rhythm, which was necessary for a film that could be, on the level of the atmosphere, very unpleasant and demanding for the viewer.

On a purely audiovisual level, however, Empire of the Rabbits offers a lot of poetry, thanks to the evocative cinematography by Claudia Becerril Bulos who shoots the vast landscapes with little to no human presence and crumbling, bare-bones interiors in naturally murky colours, almost without any artificial lighting and in an intimate hand-held mode. The film audio landscape complements the visuals and becomes a tool for dramaturgy, since the dialogues are quite scarce. The ever-present sound design of wind howling and the music by Erkan Oğur paint the picture of Musa’s inner life with more gentle notes, while it also ramps up the tension when needed.

In the end, Empire of the Rabbits is a very dark film, but with its heart in the right place. The harshness of the world it depicts is quite sobering, while the inherent goodness of its young characters signals that there is still some hope left.

A Film a Week - The Funeral / Cenaze

 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.

A Film a Week - Kerr

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Sometimes a proper gem of a movie does not get recognized the way it should, for whatever reason. In the case of Tayfun Pirselimoglu’s newest film “Kerr”, it is actually baffling that the film had a very limited tour of festivals and got very little reviews from the foreign language press. Even “Kerr” being the Turkish official submission to the Oscars race seems like a left-field choice and a very large exception to the rule. We got to see it in all of its brilliance at Belgrade FEST.

A man named Can (Erdem Şenocak) gets stuck in the town where his father resided, operated a tailor shop and died. He came for the funeral, but when he wanted to simply go back to his life, he witnesses a murder at the train station’s men’s room. The killer does not even blink, so our guy alarms the police. However, the police, the coastal town officials and esteemed citizens seem more interested in his whereabouts and the reasons for visit than in investigating the crime that happened.

Soon enough, the situation gets even more strange: the town is put into a strict quarantine due to the case of rabid dogs attacking people and killing them, and it is only the matter of time when our man gets indicted for something. The strangeness, straight from Kafka’s “The Trial”, is even further laced with other oddities: the house our unfortunate hero inherited leaks, his father’s old car cannot start, but it does not prevent it from being stolen, and seemingly the only woman in town (Jale Arikan) asks philosophical questions and answers the simple ones with even more philosophical counter-questions.

Tayfun Pirselimoglu is a rare case of a filmmaker: a writer by trade with a painter’s eye, which actually makes him a perfect man for the job. But in this adaptation of his own novel, he exposes himself as a proper renaissance personality able to connect the dots between the different references from different branches of arts into a work that is both poetic, symbolic, terrifying and life-like. The literary ones are probably the easiest to spot: our man might be in the position of Josef K, but he is more akin to Camus’ Meursault from “The Stranger” in his detachment from the world.

Cinematic ones can also be pretty obvious: a spoonful of Lynch’s surrealism (the abandoned amusement park by the sea and the crumbling hotel, for instance), soaked in Trakovsky’s poeticism (the constant rain, decay, wet floors and walls), with a quote from Kubrick here and there (the bar scene seems straight out of “Shining”), and a sprinkle of Jarmusch and his identity crisis / smalltown environment-themed movies. Lighting-wise, we can see the influences of the renaissance and baroque painters, from Da Vinci, via Caravaggio and the Flemish veduttes to the neon-lit works of modern art (kudos to the Greek DoP Andreas Sinasos), complete with bewitching framing, the use of perspective and the alternation between the different angles.

Şenocak (glimpsed in “Burning Days”) is the perfect cast for the lost and hapless Can who cannot do much other than accepting his fate in the nightmare that surrounds him. Jale Arikan provides the enigmatic presence that could be play out different ways, while the casting of the supporting characters (Pirselimoglu’s regular Riz Akin, among others) is fitting for the environment, but no less intriguing for that matter.

All things considered, “Kerr” is a film on the verge of the masterpiece, a rich tapestry of the very well known and the eye-opening details, connections, references, metaphors and symbols. It is a hell of a ride and something that simply has to be experienced.

A Film a Week - The Cemil Show / Çemil şov

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Cinephilia, the trope of the hapless protagonist going mad and the clash of the two worlds, one being contemporary, realistic and soul-crushing, and the other being fantastic and even heroic, make up for an incendiary mix in Baris Sarhan’s feature debut “The Cemil Show” that premiered at IFFR’s Big Screen Competition. As a festival, Rotterdam is not often associated with crowd-pleasing movies, but “The Cemil Show” is a bit of a standout in this year’s programme.

The titular protagonist, played by Ozan Celik, is a security guard at a gigantic Istanbul mall. Instead of doing his job to the best of his abilities (let us say that he is not of the most dependable sort of people), he daydreams about fame as an actor. Instead of watching the monitors in the video-room, he is more keen on re-watching the old Yesilcam gangster movies. He gets his shot at fame when he auditions for the role of an iconic badass in a remake of the cult classic from the sixties, titled “The Nightmare”, which was played by his idol Tungay Goral. Needless to say, the stage fright gets the better of him and he botches the audition.

His second “lucky break” is the cognition that his co-worker (maybe even a secret crush) Burcu (Nesrin Cavadzade) is Goral’s own daughter, so he uses the incident involving her and their manager, Mr Zafer (Alican Yucesoy) to blackmail her to introduce him to Tungay. Alas, before she manages to do that, Tungay dies, alone and forgotten by everyone except for the director of both the old and the new “The Nightmare” movies, Ismet Ozemir (Cezmi Baskir) that Cemil fails to impress at the funeral.

That does not persuade him to give up on his acting “career”, which leads to a chain of events in which he messes up something at his job, gets a concussion and decides to dedicate himself imitating Goral’s signature acting moves until he identifies with him and his screen persona completely. And since the trouble rarely comes alone, that kind of behavior leads him to the second blow to his head and the complete disruption of his sense of reality. He becomes Goral and any of his gangster characters from the movies…

Foolish characters harboring big dreams are not exactly a novelty in cinema, not even in Sarhan’s own filmmaking career (“The Cemil Show” is actually an expansion of his eponymous short film with which he shares some of the actors), and, as the writer and the director, he is well aware of it. He flirts with parody regarding his protagonist and his work situation (Zafer and his sidekicks are quite cartoonish bullies, while Burcu is a hysterical damsel in distress), but never crosses the line in that regard. However, the line regarding the exploitation is crossed near the end of the film, but for a well argumented reason.

The sheer amount of cinephilia is actually the trump card in Sarhan’s storytelling and directing style. The situation at the mall is a full-blown melodrama (the second favourite Turkish Yesilcam B-Movie genre, after gangster stories), so the overly expressive acting by the commanding Celik, Cavadzade and Yucesoy does not poke the eye of the viewer. The second group of references are the musical and the editing cues that mimic the old B-Movies style, for which both the composer Taner Yucel and the editor Evren Lus should be commended.

However, the aspect “The Cemil Show” stands out for are the masterfully “faked” gangster movie excerpts with then young Tungay Goral (played by Basar Alemdar) playing an array of cigarette-smoking mustached villains, showcasing an impressive variety within the sub-genre. The camerawork by Soycut Turan is especially playful in those passages, while the granulation of the image is spot on.

Although there is some lagging in the pace, especially in the first half of the film, and the idea is a bit stretched in the storytelling (the feeling is Sarhan could go deeper in a number of aspects regarding Cemil, his work, acting attempts and even film industry), so “The Cemil Show” feels a bit overlong with its 2 hours of runtime, it can still be considered more than a decent film and a sure-handed debut. There is no doubt that it could make a splash on the margins of the festival circuit (genre-specialized festivals or the late night slots at the regular ones) and in the theaters, especially on the home turf.