Aşk, Büyü Vs.

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.