Émile Breton. There Should Be A Door. L’Humanité.
There should be a door…
In Zeki Demirkubuz’s film Innocence, a door thumps incessantly without ever closing. In the first sequence, filmed in shot and counter-shot, where a judge or the director of the prison—it is never quite specified, but no matter because very quickly we understand that the filmmaker cares only for the essentials of the narrative—reads aloud a statement handed to him by a detainee, a singularly shapeless man. The spectator learns that the silent man, whose letter is being read and who has just served a ten-year sentence, does not wish to leave prison because he does not know where to go. And thus the opening of the film goes straight to the heart of the matter, indecorous and quite cheeky, as if the film were a documentary, say Raymond Depardon’s Délits flagrants (Caught in the Acts). The set-up is almost identical, all the space mirrors what is being said and what is read on the two faces. And yet, this is a fiction film. It is what the door says, beating tirelessly and which the judge will try to close without succeeding, twice. We will find it again, that door, once at the police station, other times in hotel rooms. And when it is not all together there, its dogged resistance remains as if it were meant to underline that everything in this world conspires to make society shut its eyes to the dirtiest secrets, and yet fails. The door opens. What if a mysterious pull were to resist its shutting? And what if this pull were cinema itself? That is for every spectator to decide, but it is sufficient for the filmmaker to have been there, behind these doors, to say there is far more than a news item in today’s Turkey.
With a curious hero that has not said a word yet, and who will utter but a few until the end, the film, although resolutely laconic, seems to alert the spectator: “Beware, I am in the process of revealing a story, open your eyes wide, it might very well go further than the story of this poor fellow.” For real. With the request for an extension of his sentence rejected, this puny man, his gait always slightly tucked (an admirable actor), finds himself journeying on a long wander from east to west. His voyage will carry him to Anatolia, where he spent years of youth and time in jail. And to Istanbul, where he finds a cellmate who has escaped and promised to help. And then, with a curious knot in the story, and gorgeous twist in the script, he will come to meet a raggedy cabaret singer, her daughter and her protector. The woman renders services, mounting the stages of grubby bars just as often as beds in squalid hotels. Stout and beautiful, she is loved by the guardian who watches her give herself to others. She is a woman who holds secret a love that only the end of the film will reveal, too late for bliss to flower. She is wild, not unlike the film.
Days flow unhurriedly from hotel rooms to rackety buses, impassive. Like the unspeaking hero and the young mute girl, entrusted to his care in the absence of her parents away on business or in prison, time passes in an unsettling stillness. This carefully wrought quietude is interrupted by unexpected draws of excessive love, violent, ferocious, irrepressible, excessive desire, and hate in excess that is barely muffled by hypocrisy. A woman locks her two hands on her underbelly, flinging foreword her sex in defiance of a man trampled by a sacrosanct ache, inherited from long ago in these Mediterranean lands—an ache that runs as far back in history as the fear of Menades, the ancient adepts of Dionysos whom the gods rendered crazy about their bodies. A man kills himself because he could not push any further his insult and injury to those he loved in excess. Another man walks home, feet bludgeoned by beatings given by the police, even though he is innocent.
Bursts of fury mark the storyline of this film, other moments too, as striking and bright, although more rare. There are moments when tenderness shines softly, infused with nostalgia. A woman’s hand caresses a man’s hair. A man, the most bitter of the lot, scorched by life, recounts his happy childhood in a public garden while a little girl plays not far from him. Instances when peacefulness is suspended, but listening to his story who can foretell what future awaits her? These ruptures in the tone of a film crafted like an outline in its denunciation of a ruthless society but peopled with beings made of flesh and blood, say all too well that Zeki Demirkubuz knows where he wants to go, from his first film. His very brief note in the press kit about his quest for “meaning to life” is therefore not surprising: “When you give such meaning to life, the fact of making films becomes an ethical problem. Obviously, there is no space for such comportments in this day and age. Cinema, defined as chiefly a commercial activity, linked to numbers of spectators, forces films to turn to the rest of the world and to please a majority.”
Émile Breton. L’Humanité. July 14, 1999.
Translated from French by Rasha Salti.
