Section: Close Up TR

Aşk, Büyü Vs.

Love, Spells and All That

Ümit Ünal
Turkey, 2019, 96 Min

Forbidden love: Eren, the daughter of a powerful member of parliament, and the caretaker's daughter Reyhan had an affair 20 years ago. The parents forbade the two of them to see each other any longer and Eren was sent to Paris. Now she's returning to Turkey in this reflection, at once effortless and imbued with a Mediterranean breeze, on the emotional dislocations induced by the social pressure to adapt.

Eren wants to pick up where the pair left off two decades ago as teenagers. Reyhan refuses at first, before admitting that she too shares the longing for forbidden love, even wishing it back with the help of a magician. Behind this very personal story of distance and rapprochement, fear of social control and the desire for self-realisation hides a fundamental critique of a repressive traditional society. In a dramaturgy one might almost describe as Chabrolian, with its beautiful Mediterranean location, cleverly devised passages of double-edged dialogue and unremarkable coexistences full of unexpected emotional pitfalls, Ümüt Ünal narrates a love story coloured by both the melancholy of loss and an anger at prohibition. In doing so he proves that you can tell a tale of the class antagonism experienced by the daughters of a gardener and a politician and the fatal consequences of homophobic repression without recourse to finger-wagging moralising, but instead with a fascinatingly subtle screen production.

Ümit Ünal -