The sound of the undercurrents… / Banu Bozdemir

2018.06.15
beyazperde.com

Adapted from Mehmet Eroğlu’s novel of the same name, The Disenchanted is a film that tries to interpret, through the inner core of one man, many themes: the dilemma between love and affection, age and lived experience, and the hopelessness of political foundations. With White as Snow, which he shot in 2011, Selim Güneş had tried to reflect the hopelessness within an endless whiteness. Adapted from Sabahattin Ali’s story Ayran, that film stayed in our minds mostly for its powerful visuals and minimal story. The Disenchanted, on the other hand, has turned out to be a film that wants to say a great deal emotionally but keeps locking itself up somewhere along the way. We do understand what Güneş is trying to do: the story of a man who has cut himself off from every kind of feeling and withdrawn into desolation, being shaken once again… Although the story speaks of Kuzey and Sami, in the film we mostly see Kuzey (Sami is Kuzey’s companion). The repetitive motion of a man who has wrapped himself in the hopeless memories of the past and carries not the slightest hope for the future. And then the man whose real name is Yunus: the deaths and secrets of the past, reaching back, though the film rarely voices it, to the era of Sheikh Bedrettin, and the human bodies and voices believed to lie beneath the sea… The tales that Yunus the sailor sees them from time to time… Places that leave you entirely alone with nature, and a shattering loneliness that seeps into the emotions…

Before us is a story that unfolds and develops through the frenzy of the love Şafak, who comes to research the Greek villages, feels for everything Kuzey has internalised, and through her comings and goings… For some reason, there is also something that never quite settles in the feeling of affection or love between the two. Rather than love, what we have is the state of accepting, or being unable to accept, staying and leaving. Even if this is read as Şafak’s love set against Kuzey’s affection, which cannot turn into love, unfortunately it does not come across emotionally. That is why some of what happens after Şafak leaves feels up in the air and awkward. Especially Çiğdem, who arrives years later. The physical resemblance the film tries to establish between Şafak and this character, portrayed as a know-it-all and unfeeling, feels forced. When all this comes together, the film turns into the frenzy of an ordinary man caught up in affairs of the heart. We do sense that there are other, existential troubles in the background, but they do not come out; they cannot. It turns into a game of affection between Şafak and Kuzey, in the vein of a summer romance. The part of the film after Şafak leaves, leaving Çiğdem aside, the part about searching, about searching for her in the other voices, in the suffering of the people in the sea, is definitely better…

Güneş once again puts his name to a repetitive screenplay, a state of mind. There is the effect of a visual world, far from people, leaning on the sea, the sun, the trees, but the story cannot fully settle into that world. That is why, unfortunately, the story fails to satisfy. Yet it clearly wanted to be written and filmed with a deep ache. But that ache seems to stay at the bottom of the sea, and Kuzey, too, quietly throws himself into that ache. (2.5 / 5)

*****

*** http://www.beyazperde.com/filmler/film-249200/elestiriler-beyazperde/