The film opens with the body of a woman, Ela (Define Halman). We see certain floral patterns around her waist. The camera pans up. We see another body in intimate contact with the first. The two bodies are having sex, the woman on top, the man below. Then we see the man Can (Hakan Cimenser) get up, goes into a standing shower cubicle in an ultramodern alluminium cum plexiglass apartment in a high-rise high-tech structure somewhere in Instanbul. From the books on the shelves, we notice that the couple are both designers, one an architect, the other a photographer and a conceptual artist. It's a perfectly ordered but strange arrangement, the architect lives on the floor above hers and has a proper bed whilst the woman sleeps on a sofa which doubles up as her bed at night on the floor below where the kitchen, the laundry and sitting room are located. Their respective spatial location in the domestic arrangement may be more than physical. Perhaps that's the role of women in modern day Turkey: a woman serves three purposes, for social display at public functions, as domestic helper at home and as sex object. Throughout the film we see repeated shots of the eye/vagina shaped spiral staircase,often photographed from top down and occasionally, from the side, focusing only on the feet of the apparently successful couple going up and down and round and round the curved comma-shaped steps quietly, in considered, measured paces, all passion gone. We observe from a distance of the spying camera eye that the middle age couple scarcely have any meaningful communication except occasionally through some jaded and routinized motions in bed. We detect a note of a crisis when we see Eva put down the newly installed phone with conference call function so that one can hear whatever conversation is taking place after accidentally overhearing Can's voice talking to another person. She suspected her husband having an affair but said not a word about it. She went on quietly to do the laundry, "accidentally" bumped her head on the steps in the cramped space under the spiral staircase, spilled some cloth softener After that, she told her husband she wanted to look for another apartment.
Asli appears to want to show us the state of the contemporary woman in Turkey. Of all the middle east countries, Turkey and the city of Instanbul in particular stands literally at frontier between Europe and Asia, between the present and the past. On the surface, its modernization with modern values of rationality, mechanization, constant motion, social and growing economic spell progress. But the modern structures, instead of being the instrument for the liberation of man and woman are threatening to become their prison. We observe them, as modern architecture allows us to, like so many specimens of social animals, confined each within their own personal but transparent but compartmentalized space, caught by an intricate and inextricable networks of family, society, economy and the human need for social recognition and approval and a very private need for self-expression and individual autonomy, frozen, unable to move, scarcely able to even breathe. When the couple go to visit their daughter Nil,(Gizem Akman), who's in college and hasn't quite decided what she wants to do, shagging in with her boyfriend Tan (Onur Dikmen) who is studying archaeology with hopes of becoming a professional in that field, in another modern apartment up in hills of Ankara ,they encounter a snow storm shortly after an earlier 7.2 Richter Scale earthquake. When Eva arrives, she goes out into the balcony of their tiny apartment for some fresh air and feels the snow on floor of the tiny veranda. After that, she felt ill and had to lie down because of her high blood pressure. Everyone is alarmed. She is rushed to hospital, has a brain scan done and is later told that the dizzy spell was psychologically induced, arising from stress because of her coming exhibition where she is about to showcase some light effects works. The exhibition turned out to be "success" but such success did not help boost the sale of her works at the gallery.
During the chit chat in the middle of a house warming party on the lawn of their tiny little garden outside their new house Nil comments without really thinking that if Eva does not like the gallery with which she is co-operating, why it is that she doesn't switch to another one. She replies that at her age, it's not as easy as Nil thinks. So life goes on, the way it has, for the several decades of their lack lustre marriage, stuck, frozen, cocooned, despite its dissatisfactions, artistically as well as domestically. She continues to suffer, clear sighted but in silence, despite being the model couple and the objects of envy in the eyes of their adoring friends and colleagues. There's another telling scene. At the exhibition, her female colleague needed to take a cigarette outside the gallery and the two got talking. Her colleague told her how she could not get along with her mate. Eva told her, she had only one choice: leave him. It's seems that women have two choices: leave or stay and do her best to tolerate her suffering, in silence.
I like the cinematographic works. There's a lot of close up on the faces of the actor and actress, both excellent with their eyes and tiny facial movements The scenes are shot statically, emphasizing the lack of dynamism in the lives of its protagonist, mainly Eva, who did a perfect job portraying the sharp-eyed artist but trapped middle-aged woman, confined within the grays, the dull greens, the dull blues of her life, a half reluctant prisoner of metal and glass, ostensibly in perfect order and harmony but without any real life. She has got piercing eyes, eyes as sharp as and as devoid of emotions as the steely window frames of her apartment. The only time when we find some other color is the light show at Eva's exhibition, when everything is immersed in diffused yellows (the only color which has a hint of life-giving "warmth") but it was a yellow in artificial lighting conditions, as if in a fog, not the yellow of the sun flower. But it's in dream territory of "art". In fact, throughout the whole film we never once had a clear day, or any shot of a sun shining upon the verdant freshness of any grass or trees. If there's any sun, it has to enter through the filter of a car's windscreen and could never reach the eyes of the protagonists. The lighting is always artificial light from the ceiling, phosphorescent or LEDs, always a hazy light, a light which doesn't jar on one's optic nerves, but by the same token, a light without life. In a way, it's a very feminine film, done without fuss, with attention to many silent, small but significant details. Asli Özge has subtly but perfectly captured the sense of powerlessness experienced by the middle aged Eva with her sagging muscles and impassive face. She observes. But there's little she can do to change what she observes. Perhaps she is unable to. Perhaps she is unwilling to. Who knows?
Eva and Can, enclosed in the cramped space of a car, on the way to back from a journey. They scarcely talk.
Here's the link to a trailer of the film:http://www.arte.tv/fr/7314540.html
Why did the director of photography hate his name?
回覆刪除[版主回覆03/19/2013 21:06:34]He said it was an ugly sounding name perhaps because it's difficult to pronounce his first name together with his family name quickly together but I didn't press him to explain whether that might be the reason. In any case, he said that that's the name he was given and has used for a long time and shrugged his shoulders to indicate that that's something he must accept.