The Disenchanted: Is love about making a choice? / Berna Kuleli

2018.06.15
perasinema.com

“so goodbye, you are looking for love and I for death” – Federico Garcia Lorca

Kuzey runs a hotel called Karayel in Eski Foça with his friend Sami. In 1998, the young and beautiful Şafak, who has come to Eski Foça to research the Greek villages, stays at the Karayel Hotel. Şafak falls in love with Kuzey. In 2003, Çiğdem arrives at the hotel. Çiğdem, the assistant of Kuzey’s elder brother, takes on the debts of the hotel, which is going bankrupt, and saves it. In the meantime Çiğdem also becomes interested in Kuzey. This only reminds Kuzey of Şafak, again and anew.

The film opens with lines by Federico Garcia Lorca and the image of a piece of red cloth drifting through the depths of the sea. This image is just one of the scenes that push the viewer to think from the beginning of the film to the end, helping us understand the subject step by step, as if solving a puzzle. The red moving through the blue water is also an example of the film’s striking visuals.

Selim Güneş had been determined to make a film about love ever since he finished his first film, White as Snow. The Disenchanted contains questions that push the viewer to think about love and affection. How can a woman and a man falling in love with each other be explained? Can a person be ready to fall in love? Does love change with age? Is love about making a choice? Şafak asks the man she is madly in love with: is it so hard to say stay? In the last scenes of the film, Kuzey gives his answer in the inner monologues where he almost criticises himself, but regret still does not let go of him.

Nothing We See in the Film Is a Coincidence

Producer Nur Güneş says the frames were carefully thought out, and that the curtains flying in the wind or the black bag flying along behind Şafak and Kuzey are no coincidence. Just like the image of the sea reflected in Kuzey’s window on a sunny day. This is also the symbolic expression of a union. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say of Şafak’s mad love for Kuzey, because Kuzey is an example of how a person who cannot love himself cannot love anyone else either. Şafak is the one who moves, who does not shy away from making decisions. Kuzey’s life, meanwhile, is like the faded bougainvilleas crushed on the ground.

Selim Güneş is a careful, meticulous director. The Disenchanted is a film about love and loving, shot in an abandoned holiday village in Foça. The sound of the waves, the crickets and the wind are used very well to convey the atmosphere. A film that told of the loneliness, regrets and losses of the owner of a hotel that no longer runs, without non-diegetic music and with images that move forward in long takes, might draw fewer viewers, but it would have suited this film’s feeling better. With long takes, the viewer would have been drawn further into Kuzey’s loneliness and Şafak’s returns, and would have wrestled more with the answers to the questions they ask themselves. Even so, the film succeeds in conveying the feelings of Kuzey and Şafak. When it ends, you may sit in your seat and wonder what happened there and what else could have happened. You may even write different endings in your head. At a time when many other much-talked-about directors in our cinema turn out careless, run-of-the-mill work, The Disenchanted will hold an important place for Selim Güneş’s originality as a director and for his success in art direction, directing actors and cinematography.

From Istanbul Photographs to the Cinema Screen

Selim Güneş began taking photographs in 1989, after studying electrical engineering and business administration. He is one of the photographers whom the Istanbul Photography and Cinema Amateurs Association (İFSAK) brought to cinema. Looking at his photographs, we can call him a photographer in love with Istanbul. He photographs the Istanbul that existed yesterday, that is fading away today and that he wants to exist in the future. This deep passion for photography showed itself in both films he directed. When Selim Güneş published his album İstanbul Lodoslar Kenti in 2008, he used as its last photograph, in the Coming Programme section, a picture of a cinema whose posters had not yet gone up. And the work that followed this photography book was his first feature film.

He made White as Snow, adapted from Sabahattin Ali’s story Ayran, in 2010. Drawing on his identity as a photographer as well, Selim Güneş had stood out in cinema for his meticulous work. The Disenchanted is Selim Güneş’s second feature film. As in the first, in this film too he brings together literature, cinema and photography. Adapted for the screen from Mehmet Eroğlu’s novel of the same name, The Disenchanted questions love, loving, regret, experiencing being us, failing to be oneself, suffering because of love, leaving and reunion. In his film the director sends a greeting to the world of photography with Robert Capa’s words: if your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough to your subject.

*****

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