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Young Turks
Making waves at the MFA

BY PETER KEOUGH


So now that Hollywood has begun co-opting Asian cinema by giving 10 Oscar nominations to the box-office-busting Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where will the next distinctive, national new wave in cinema come from? Iran? No, the likes of Abbas Kiarostami (whose Through the Olive Trees Miramax bought and never released) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf seem fundamentally inhospitable to studio smarm. Turkey, then? Part European, part Asian, these people seem Western-friendly but not entirely colonized. And as the seven features in the MFA’s first annual Turkish Film Festival demonstrate, they make some terrific films.

As for a Turkish director likely to break through to international renown, my money is on Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who’s represented by his accomplished first two features. The Town (1997; March 1 at 6 p.m. and March 11 at 11 a.m.) is a black-and-white gem with numinous details and authentic performances (the cast consists largely of the director’s family members) that recall Robert Bresson and themes and a structure that suggest Alain Resnais. A seemingly homeless family gathered by a fire tell tales of the past and reflect on the future; flashbacks and/or flashforwards illustrate the general tone of despair, futility, and perseverance. The Town is challenging and downbeat but ultimately uplifting.

Less grim and more ambitious is Clouds of May (1999; March 1 at 7:45 p.m. and March 10 at 3:45 p.m.), which won last year’s Best European Film award from the International Film Critics Association (FIPRESCI). Kiarostami-like, Ceylan reflects back on the making of his previous film, as a young filmmaker returns to his home town to find locations and enlist family members (the same family members from in The Town) in making a semi-autobiographical debut feature. It sounds suffocating, but Ceylan filigrees the self-reflexivity with charming, poignant vignettes (the tale of a little boy with an egg is a masterpiece of lost innocence) and a stunning conclusion that’s the best use of sunlight in movies since the ending of Eric Rohmer’s Summer.

Ceylan dedicates Clouds to Anton Chekhov, and the bemused melancholy of the Russian master permeates his vision. Zeki Demirkubuz, on the other hand, ends his Innocence (1997; March 8 at 8 p.m. and March 14 at 6 p.m.) with a quote from Samuel Beckett, and the Theater of the Absurd has seldom been as theatrical. A sheepish convict released after a 10-year sentence drops by a small town where he befriends a couple with their own tale to tell: she’s a nightclub singer/prostitute infatuated with another imprisoned murderer, and her companion is in love with her but pimps her out to pay the bills. They fight a lot, sometimes with guns. The hero falls in love with the singer, and things really get out of hand when the other convict escapes and the title virtue is put to the test.

Or something like that. The film’s hysteria and melodramatic excess are hard to figure. The black-comic tone in Demirkubuz’s Third Page (1999; March 9 at 8 p.m. and March 14 at 8 p.m.) is more controlled. Isa, a nebbishy movie extra whose dream is to have the starring role in one of Istanbul’s lurid soap operas, gets beaten up by his boss for losing $50. Back home, his landlord threatens to beat him up if he doesn’t pay his rent. Isa thinks about shooting himself, then shoots his landlord. That introduces him to his next-door neighbor Meryem, who is regularly beaten up by her husband and with whom Isa soon falls in love. Masochistic or misogynistic though the director may be, Third Page beguiles with its low-key, nightmarish inventiveness as Isa’s life begins to mirror the soaps he schleps in.

Nightmare is the mode also in Ömer Kavur’s Journey on the Hour Hand (1997; screens March 2 at 8 p.m. and March 3 at 1:30 p.m.), which is as circular and self-enclosed as the title suggests. A clock mender gets an assignment from a mystery client (whose announcement that time does not exist should be our hero’s first tipoff). There he meets a beautiful woman, with whom he falls in love (no beatings this time), and her older, sinister husband. And the doomed man in the red scarf. Journey is haunting but unsatisfying.

One would think that the country that inspired Midnight Express might produce some films about repression and discontent. Actually, all of the above could be read as political allegories, but I’ll spare you that. More literal is After the Fall (1999; March 3 at 3:45 p.m.), which is set during the police state that followed the 1980 Turkish coup d’état. Unfortunately it’s the most amateurish film in the festival. Far hipper is veteran Turkish director Orhan Oguz’s Losers of the Dark City (1999; March 2 at 5:45 p.m.), which takes reality TV and reverses it. A bohemian couple in Istanbul find that life isn’t all fun and games when a new neighbor takes an interest in them. Part Videodrome, part Psycho, Losers of the Dark City sheds a distinctive Turkish light on the postmodern malaise of individualism and media-induced homogeneity.