Jacques Mandelbaum. “Fate” and “Confession”: Turkey in the Wake of Emotional Alienation. Le Monde.

“Fate” and “Confession”: Turkey, in the wake of emotional alienation

Two films by Zeki Demirkubuz set under the sign of fate

It is somewhat rare for two films from the same director to be selected at Cannes, but Fate and Confession, shot in the same year, represent the first two parts of a trilogy by the Turkish filmmaker Zeki Demirkubuz, whose feature film, Innocence, had been the first to be discovered in France in 1999. Fate, based on Albert Camus’ The Stranger, follows a character who seems exiled from the world, indifferent to everything including his own fate. Musa is a solitary and quiet young man whose withdrawal from life is a sort of philosophical challenge to the notion of humanity itself. Musa, who is a customs officer, acknowledges the death of his mother in whose company he lived, with indifference, if not relief. Afterwards, he marries a colleague who is tired of being the mistress of their office head. As the latter murders his wife and children, Musa – who was with them that day on his advice – is charged with the crime and takes responsibility for a murder he did not commit. The constant passiveness of Musa, which is cinematographically problematic for a supposedly realistic setting, reflects in the inexorable guilt which haunts the couple in The Confession. Harun, an engineer, had married Nilgun after taking her away from his best friend, who committed suicide. The movie, in the wake of Antonioni, seems to attempt to measure the indefinable distance between heartbreak and reconciliation, worship and humiliation which ravage their union.

These two films which were placed under the auspices of absurdity and fatalism, subtly explore the emotional alienation and disagreement between the sexes in a society torn by conflicting demands.  A talent that, from now on, will be closely watched because his movies testify through the accuracy of the staging and he has a way of carving anything but the essential out of the plot.

Jacques Mandelbaum. Le Monde. May 26, 2002.

Translated from French by Lorenzo Pesoli.