The Disenchanted: Lives Loosely Stitched to Themselves in Nature’s Embrace, and the Escape into Abjection as a Possibility of Freedom / Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim

2018.07.04
oggito.com

With The Disenchanted, his second feature, made in 2018, Selim Güneş once again offers us a period and atmosphere piece. This time, though, he tries to convey, through the transforming power of literature and right in the lap of nature, the full complexity of the most primal and most basic intensity of feeling that comes from human beings: love.

If a person has come to see themselves as an incurable, creature-like being in pain, what remains of the dream? When one cannot cross the threshold of a past trauma that has split both mind and body beyond any return, is the dream, which cannot be held back in spite of everything, still a friend, or has it become an enemy? Amid the deliriums that come from the past, right in nature’s embrace, does taking refuge in writing and literature, with a Wordsworthian spirit or with a wildness of soul like Tezer Özlü’s, give the dreams back? And if personal memory has turned into pure pain and the dreams do not return, is it inevitable, as a possibility of freedom, that identity drifts into sheer destruction and surrenders to the powers of horror? At this point, a person’s flight into absolute abjection, and the suicide that eventually comes or is destined to come, ties one more knot in the matter. Here there is an imagining of freedom that buds from death. And if, moreover, this imagining, settled within love and literature, strives to become visible alongside the sound of the sea, the wave’s lust for the rock, the rustle of the leaf, the ancientness of the tree and the wisdom of the stone, the subject becomes even more interesting. The freedom and rebellion of passing through love, burning, and surrendering to destruction and death become possible through other witnesses. For under the witness of the ground underfoot, of the tree trunk that has scabbed over who knows how many deliriums in its rings and its shade, and of water, the fluid memory that has revived and drowned who knows how many hopes of life, pain draws pain, love draws love, and one moth passes over into another. In the end both vanish from this world. What remains is the memory of stone, tree and water: the breathtaking, love-mad frenzy of the landscape, the ache deep down, the ecstatic force in writing and the residue in language.

These thoughts come to mind as we watch the film of the same name adapted from Mehmet Eroğlu’s novel The Disenchanted, published in 2005. The director of The Disenchanted is Selim Güneş, who in 2010 also brought to the big screen a free adaptation of Sabahattin Ali’s story “Ayran”. White as Snow was etched into our memories with little Hasan’s tremendous struggle on the line between life and death, as he wraps the stark white, harsh blanket of snow around his shoulders in the bitterest conditions of winter and sells ayran to support his family, and with the noble, wild, sensuous landscape of Artvin and its music. With his second feature, The Disenchanted, made in 2018, Selim Güneş once again comes before us with a construction of period and atmosphere. This time, however, he tries to convey, right in nature’s embrace and through the transformative power of literature, the whole complexity of the human being and, of course, of love, the most primal and fundamental intensity of emotion to arise from human beings.

The film’s cast includes names such as Mert Tanık, Denise Ankel, Bahar Yanılmaz, Cansı Fırıncı, Lilâ Gürmen and Buğra Koçtepe. Drawing its strength both from a lyrical visual quality ‒ in fact from Güneş’s mastery as a photographer ‒ and from the director’s weaving of the close relationship between cinema and literature through subtle references, the film tells us the story of those who cannot hold on, of lives forever loosely and awkwardly stitched to themselves. After the severe torture he suffered in the 12 September period, Kuzey, having turned his back on both himself and life, settles in Foça and carries on running a hotel that, like him, is in disarray and barely able to stand. At the same time he is trying to write a novel called The Disenchanted. At Kuzey’s side is his close friend Sami, who has never left him alone since their university years. Because of bullet wounds he received in the past, Sami has problems with both legs and gets through life on crutches. He lives with Kuzey, who in his present state has given up all expectations of life. Sami is deeply saddened by the bad state both Kuzey and the hotel have fallen into, and wants to do something so that the hotel can be sold at a profit. One day the arrival at the hotel of Şafak, a young German-Turkish woman with life bursting from her eyes, whose only dream is to travel the world, escape to the ocean and see Asia and Africa, completely changes the life first of Kuzey and then of all the hotel’s residents (above all Sami, Handan Hanım, and Çiğdem, who comes to the hotel after Şafak and is in a way smitten with Kuzey). The love between Kuzey, who is resentful of life, and Şafak, who has turned her face to the world and come to the region to research the old Greek villages, tries to grow in the shadow and under the ghost of the confessions of the ’78 generation, but it cannot. In the climate of Kuzey’s soul these words become a cloud and let their drops fall to the earth: “Yes, we couldn’t make the revolution. We couldn’t be good lovers. Ours is a generation that could never say ‘I’, only ever ‘we’… We always believed in humanity. A generation that belongs not to the earth but to the sky.” Şafak, who in the end is forced to drown in these drops of the incomplete revolutionary and incomplete lover, and the great wreckage she leaves behind, only paint the deep melancholy of the film and its main character even blacker. Kuzey drifts step by step towards death to meet Şafak; in the matchless nature of Foça, in its cool waters, what remains is the power of words, the voice of literature.

Before moving on to the subtle interweaving of cinema and literature that Güneş offers us, it is worth opening up a little further the climate of the soul we have touched on. For although at first this climate seems to point to a vicious circle and to one-sidedness, the film lends itself to a different reading. Throughout the film, what Kuzey feels for Şafak and the chain of things that cannot be belong to the sky precisely because of the words above that pour from Kuzey’s mouth, and they do not, cannot, go beyond a daydream. The ghost of the past is in the present, the creature-like being is in the present, and it constantly lays bare both its own possibility and its impossibility. In fact, it is also possible to read Kuzey’s entrapment, his states of “fragile masculinity”, as an unconscious flight into abjection. Abjection, as theorised by Julia Kristeva, is the child’s need to separate itself from the maternal function on which its initial lack of development makes it dependent. In fact, abjection is the threat of total annihilation, as an instance of loss that shows itself before castration anxiety. In abjection, which makes us question the boundaries of our sense of self in what we see and sense (for example, the disgust and fear we feel when we come face to face with a corpse or a horrifying open wound), existence remains under threat. What is interesting is that this moment of threat, because of the high adrenaline it releases, perhaps opens the way to many different directions. Zeynep Direk says the following on this subject: “By the relation of abjection I want to call to mind a fundamental ambiguity. The coexistence of reverence and respect, of granting the other the right to speak, with disgust and looking down on it as lesser than oneself. Both exalting a difference and almost sanctifying it, and being able to devalue it so far as to fling it onto the rubbish heap” (Amargi Dergi, 2011). Kuzey both exalts his own difference, in other words the ’78 generation, and, regarding himself as utterly small, carries the desire to erase himself from life. Such an oscillation and ambiguity, which we feel in the film, lays bare a possibility of freedom that could be born from abjection and perhaps from death. Of course, Kuzey’s and Şafak’s searches for freedom and their choices, which flare up and die out within their love full of dead ends, are not the same. Şafak, within the masculine codes of the man she is blindly in love with and of the ’78 generation, is forced to sink herself and her dreams to the bottom of the sea. In this sense, abstract themes such as love, death, loneliness and exile from oneself should not be considered apart from constructions of gender. Another reading of the film can open up precisely from this point. The openness that Güneş offers us in his adaptation is truly favourable in this sense.

In the very first frame of the film we are greeted by these words of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca: “Very well. Goodbye. You are looking for love. And I, for death.” With these words a red scarf sways slowly under the water and mingles with the water’s memory. At the opening of the film we watch a scene from Solaris, which Tarkovsky adapted from Stanislav Lem: “No, it’s not harmful. Of course it’s not harmful. Do you remember Tolstoy? Was Tolstoy’s pain the pain of not being able to love all people?” Güneş first threads the human condition and love through Tarkovsky’s needle and distils them with quotations from Lorca and Tolstoy before passing them on to the audience, and these are just a few of the stops on the friendship between cinema and literature whose trail we follow with pleasure throughout the film. The poem “The Dead Woman” from Pablo Neruda’s book The Captain’s Verses; the voice of Arkadaş Z. Özger, which heals, wraps itself around pain and embraces hope; the singular spirit of Tezer Özlü, who entwined life with death and death with life and pinned her own existence to death; the awareness of death and of being mortal in Jim Morrison, the poet of chaos; and finally the hero Kuzey’s own The Disenchanted. All these stops come from what inspired Güneş in writing the screenplay and directing the film, and from what he wanted to reach the audience. The allusions, especially in the dialogue, which an attentive reader of literature will not miss, go beyond a one-way adaptation and take the viewer on an intertextual journey.

In the end, all these allusions become even more beautiful through the film’s sensuous visuals. The Disenchanted is a journey of those who cannot hold on, witnessed by the stone, the water and the leaf we mentioned at the beginning, in other words by matter’s own will. Eroğlu’s politically more layered and dense content, for example Kuzey’s and Sami’s revolutionary youth and their stories and descriptions of 12 September full of pain, anger and rebellion, takes on a much softer form in Güneş’s adaptation. Whether to like this choice or not is up to the viewer. But as it stands, the rubbish bag flying up behind the car wheels on a dirt road, the red scarf sinking to the bottom of the sea, the purple toy pinwheel that comes back with every pain, the heartaches scratched onto a boat, the reunions and separations echoing from garden fences, the dance of coffee and milk all herald the emergence in Güneş’s cinema of a subtle, sensuous language whose place is now clear.

*****

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