‘Ise yarar bir sey‘ by Turkish director Pelin Esmer is a combination of art and road movies quite different from the other films (not too many, unfortunately) that I have seen coming from Turkey. If I am to compare her style with a cinematographic school that I know better, I would pick the Romanian ‘minimalist’ cinema of the last 10-15 years. Pelin Esmer‘s focus is very much on the details of everyday life, her actors are all very well selected and directed and the insight to their psychologies and motivations is deep and sympathetic. The overall vision does not avoid symbolism, as well as a critical but not necessarily direct approach to reality.
source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6214084
The heroes of the film are two women belonging to two different generations, who meet in a railway station before taking together the train on an overnight trip to a remote city on the seashore. The elder one is in her 40s, she seems confident and cultivated, and likes to observe life and other people with an empathetic look. She declares to be a lawyer, and we later understand that she is also a poet, a detail that we discover gradually and which plays an important role in the story. The younger one is in her 20s, she is a nurse who dreams to become an actress, vulnerable and under stress because her trip has an unusual goal – helping a friend of a friend to die. Somehow obliged at the beginning by the closed enclosure of the traveling train (where more than half of the action takes place), the two women forge a dialog that helps them know each other and us understanding piece by piece who they are. At the end of the train trip the poet joins the younger woman in her deadly mission. Is this by curiosity? Maybe to understand what makes a man want to die? Or rather to avoid his death and the potential torment that the young woman would go through if she performed the deed – forbidden by conventional moral and by laws?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm-y7iphRZo
(video source Binbir Dizi)
I liked the film, but I should warn other that this is not easy stuff. Pelin Esmer has a sure hand as film director, the cinematography is beautiful, the acting is excellent. There is a lot of quality of the poetic kind in this movie, but it is slow developing, it asks to be discovered, and some of the best stuff comes by the end, and is buried in characters development, in off-screen or loudly read text including some poetry, with situations that are interesting on the psychological plan, but far from spectacular. One scene, the 25 years reunion of the high school colleagues that the elder woman attends (that was the initial goal of her trip) offers a one shot very sharp view through the middle class of the Turkish society, and this is the one that reminded me similar scenes in two Romanian movies. It’s beautiful and interesting, but somehow detached from the rest of the film. There is also no decisive conclusion to the story, the message seems to be about life and death being part of the same unique universe, but this is left to the viewers to reach. It may also say that beauty is in the details of life as observed by the principal character, but it may not be worth clinging to it at any price.