“Istanbul has 20 million people!” a key character protests in Life (Hayat) “It’s not a city, it’s Armageddon!” Turkish cinema may have excelled in austere, pessimistic, slow-paced drama in recent years, but uncompromising low-budget auteur Zeki Demirkubuz has carved his own special brand of existential despair. Playing on tensions between urban and rural, men and women, old and young, religious and secular, this talk-heavy contemporary ensemble piece is emphatically aimed at art-house audiences, its ungainly episodic structure running much too long at over three hours. Even so, it rewards patient viewers with moments of sardonic humour, caustic social critique and a quietly angry feminist message. It is screening in competition this week at Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta.
As a young man, Demirkubuz was jailed and tortured for his leftist views following Turkey’s military coup in 1980. Without his prison experience, he once claimed, he would not have become a film-maker. The director cites loneliness as his key dramatic theme, and Life certainly presents us with a bunch of characters who are alienated from each other, even when thrown together by fate.
Adopting a leisurely pace and shifting viewpoint, Demirkubuz initially concentrates on Riza (Burak Dakak), a young bakery worker in a rural backwater town whose arranged marriage has recently been cancelled. Defying pressure from her conservative parents, sullen teenage beauty Hicran (Miray Daner) secretly left town to forge a new life in Istanbul. The couple barely knew each other, so Riza initially shrugs off this public humiliation.
But after much taunting by family and friends, he becomes increasingly fixated on his fugitive fiancée and her mysterious vanishing act. Eventually, he sets off to Istanbul to try and track her down. Demirkubuz keeps Riza’s motives murky: unrequited love? Wounded pride? Violent revenge? There are faint but discernible echoes of John Wayne’s similar quest in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) here, possibly intentional.
Riza’s bumpy adventures among the grifters, sex workers, petty criminals and sarcastic police officers of Istanbul lend the film a more comically absurd tone. He eventually rescues Hicran from the clutches of a clownish pimp and his loose-cannon associate, a clandestine operation that climaxes in a lethal showdown. Forced to return home to the domineering father Memet (Umut Kurt) and stifling village she thought she had escaped, Hicran grudgingly consents to another arranged marriage, this time to middle-aged widower Orhan (Cem Davran), who is wealthy and affectionate but also an obsessively jealous stalker.
Life plots a circular journey, with Hicran initially rejecting the narrow expectations of village life to chase freedom in the big city, only for that to become just another trap, with a slightly different cohort of abusive men in charge. Indeed, a steady background pulse of brutish misogyny runs through Life. “I will kill myself if she comes back alive,” vows Hicran’s father Memet after she goes missing. “If she’s dead I’ll feed her to the dogs.” When she does return, he beats her to the ground and calls her a “whore”, a casual insult also used by most of the film’s other male characters.
In Demirkubuz’s worldview men are routinely violent, controlling and needy, often while also being socially conservative and religiously pious in hypocritical ways. But the director’s deadpan observational style does not deal in absolutes or righteous moral judgements. Despite her father’s monstrous behaviour, Hicran still loves him and craves his approval, while dismissing her mother as “weak and spiritless” for being his chief victim. There are no easy answers here.
Demirkubuz’s approach to cinematic time feels almost purposely anti-dramatic, often jumping past major events to linger on domestic details and ruminative interludes. Various deaths, marriages, divorces and bloody confrontations happen off-screen, including a fatal shooting incident in which the camera zooms in on nearby witnesses rather than the event itself. The director favours long discursive dialogues on the human condition rather than deeper character insights. This banal conective tissue is arguably a more realistic reflection of the human experience than more emotionally charged flashpoints. But while this may be an intellectually valid point, it is a risky approach to drama.
Life is rooted in downbeat naturalism and muted colours, mostly using static shots and ultra-slow pans, its spare lyrical score deployed at a bare minimum. Demirkubuz makes it abundantly clear he is not aiming for upbeat cinematic entertainment here. That said, he does wrong-foot us with an unusually sunny finale, gently hinting that the meaningless void of existence can be made bearable by love, good communication and mutual respect. It’s a small silver lining on a huge cloud but, after three long hours, a welcome one.
Director, screenwriter, producer, editing: Zeki Demirkubuz
Cast: Miray Daner, Burak Dakak, Cem Davran, Umut Kurt, Melis Birkan, Osman Alkas
Cinematography: Cevahir Sahin, Kursat Uresin
Production company: Mavi Film (Bulgaria)
World sales: Basak Emre Pundurs
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Competition)
In Turkish
193 minutes
