A melancholic love story / Alin Taşçıyan

2018.06.15
ahvalnews6.com

The Disenchanted, Selim Güneş’s second feature, is a romantic Mehmet Eroğlu adaptation that carries the feeling of the 1980s. It tells of the love, and the failed relationship, between a man who thinks of himself as ‘defeated’ and has withdrawn into a kind of seclusion, who has not killed himself but has given up all hope of life, and his exact opposite: a woman full of life who wants to see Asia and Africa.

Selim Güneş, known as a photographer who has held solo exhibitions, taken part in group exhibitions and published Lodoslar Kenti, an album about Istanbul, stepped behind the camera in 2010 to shoot moving images.

He adapted Sabahattin Ali’s 1938 story Ayran for the cinema under the title White as Snow. With this free adaptation, made at a time when reading Sabahattin Ali was not as ‘fashionable’ as it is today, he turned the tragedy of a poor child trying to support his family by selling ayran in the snow and the winter into a visual poem. It won the Special Jury Award at the 2011 Sofia Film Festival.

After White as Snow, shot in the snowy mountains of the Black Sea where he was born, the director now comes down to the Aegean coast. The Disenchanted, set in Foça, is also a literary adaptation: Mehmet Eroğlu’s 2005 novel The Disenchanted. Eroğlu, who left his mark on the 1980s with his political novels, also published his latest book, Kıyıdan Uzakta, this year.

The Disenchanted tells of the trials with women of a male character who cannot shake off the effects of what he went through in his politically active youth, who seeks peace at the bottom of a bottle, and who is closed to change and to the new opportunities life might offer.

In parallel editing, we follow what Kuzey (Mert Tanık) goes through, five years apart, with two attractive women half his age, both with careers of their own. Kuzey is also the film’s narrator. The Disenchanted, which gives the film its name, is the title of the autobiographical book he wants to write…

In Foça, Kuzey runs the Karayel Hotel, on the verge of bankruptcy, together with Sami (Buğra Koçtepe), the friend he met at university who was shot and left unable to walk because of him. While wrestling with the guilt caused by the disappearance five years ago of Şafak (Denise Ankel), who was “madly” in love with him (it is assumed she drove her car off into the sea, but it has never been found), he is also trying to save the hotel.

He refuses financial help from his brother, because his brother is a capitalist, even if he does not say so, but he cannot turn away the interest of Çiğdem (Bahar Yanılmaz), the flirtatious investment adviser his brother sends, who is red-haired just like Şafak…

This character-driven film has a side that leaves, if not the audience, then the critic in a dilemma. It tends to mythologise the ’78 generation. Believing the description the author gives through the mouth of his hero Kuzey, “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,” requires you to love the story and the characters.

On the whole it is well shot and well edited… Apart from the music being far too dominant, there is nothing to object to. In directing the actors, a style has been chosen that, fittingly for the film’s title, is far from natural, one we might describe as “dreamlike”, and that underlines that they are entirely fictional. Whether you like this style or not again depends on the relationship you form with the characters…

If you embrace the left-wing ideological framework drawn by The Disenchanted, understand the revolutionary male type it romanticises, and accept its definition of love, supported by quotations from cinema and literature, you may find it enjoyable to watch…

Because from its very first scenes the film aims to wrap its viewers in Kuzey’s melancholy. We realise that the first image we see is his dream, or rather his nightmare. Under water, a piece of orange fabric drifts by. This is an image that will be repeated later, but first, Lorca’s lines appear on the screen.

Very well. Goodbye.
You are looking for love.
And I, for death.

After the metaphor of milk poured into coffee, whose meaning will become clear at the end of the film, we see a man staring at a television screen as if spellbound. On the screen is a scene from Solaris, which Tarkovsky adapted from Stanislav Lem, in which Kris Kelvin says: “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? How much time has passed since then? I can’t remember, help me. Let’s say I love you. Love is something we can feel. But it can never be explained. Only the idea of love can be explained.” With these layered references, The Disenchanted reaches quite an ambitious level for a modest production.

Despite his background in photography, Selim Güneş tries to draw his strength not from his images but from his text. He uses the natural beauty of Foça and its surroundings as a backdrop, but expresses his whole concern through words.
Between Kuzey and Şafak
“– I am looking for something greater than happiness.”
“– I know two things greater than happiness: love and pain.”
“– Doesn’t love come out of pain too?” – exchanges like these pass between them.
Or it tries to make an impact with lines such as “Paradise is in the sea.” or “What would you do for me, would you die for me?” For someone who can neither believe in nor sympathise with this ‘hero’, his past or his love, the text also contains its own self-criticism.

The following dialogue takes place between Kuzey and his neighbour Handan (Lila Gürmen):
“- You’re one sentimental bastard, unbearably so!”
“- Actually, I’m just a shitty guy.”

*****

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