Ovul Durmusoglu. Fate. Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz.
Yazgı / Fate
In his films, Zeki Demirkubuz dives recklessly into the fundamental contradictions of life without being afraid of falling into deep and basic controversies. He passionately searches for his human-ness in the darkness. Yazgı (Fate, 2001),the first film in his trilogy “Tales of Darkness,” offers a controversial interpretation of Albert Camus’s literary classic of alienation, The Stranger.
The title of the film refers to a central, recurring motif in Demirkubuz’s cinema: destiny. His latest masterpiece carries a similar name, Kader (Destiny, 2006). Both of these words signify destiny while Fate especially underlines predetermination. “Written on my forehead,” a frequently used colloquial saying in Turkish, signifies a mode of thinking connected to the more Islamic way of resigning oneself to God. The gist of the film lies in its interpretation of the discourse of apathy and socially detached individuality in The Stranger as an unchangeable destiny. For Demirkubuz, the darkness of the underground is a fate to be borne by human beings in life.
In name, our anti-hero Musa (Serdar Orçin)—surely one of the personas of the director himself—echoes Meursault and the prophet Moses. He lives alone with his mother in a lower-class neighborhood in Istanbul and works in an ordinary customs office. He has simple but persistent habits, and his taciturn and distanced attitude reveals itself in his standard reply to all questions: “I don’t care, it’s all equal to me.” Contrary to expectations, things happen in the course of the film but do not lead to catharsis or epiphany for Musa. He does not react to finding his mother dead in her bed one day. He does not care that he is marrying a young woman he does not like or even care to get to know. He shows no reaction when he is sentenced to life in prison for three murders he did not commit. Fleshed out marvelously by Serdar Orçin, Musa carries the same disinterested and blank attitude throughout the entire film, which makes it difficult for the audience to identify with him. Since Demirkubuz understands the nihilism of the underground as the main critique of the morals of society, of what is deemed good and evil in life, he presents Musa’s absurd apathy not as an adopted behavior but as a critical frame of mind that he has had from the beginning as a radical choice about life. Musa is a silent spokesman interrogating the hypocrisy of values, vice, guilt, and the pseudo- correctness of society’s morality.
The power of Fate comes from Demirkubuz’s confrontation with his audience’s expectations, both morally and cinematically. In a long dialogue near the end of the film, Demirkubuz explains his stance on developing a film such as this, and through Musa’s words he challenges the audience by asking them the source of Musa’s guilt: Is Musa guilty of homicide now or of not being sad about his mother’s death? Demirkubuz persistently escapes the clichés of psychologically-oriented films. While escaping them, he uses seemingly under-elaborated visual aesthetics that never overwhelm his effective storytelling, but instead nourish it. In the end, it is impossible not to react to what he does in Fate. He thrives on the fundamental question of what is beyond good and evil, and urges the audience to look into their own darkness through his controversial, archetypal individual of modernity, coming this time not from France but from Turkey.
Ovul Durmusoglu. Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz. Eds. Zeynep Dadak-Enis Kostepen. New York: Altyazı, Arte East, Moon and Stars Project. 2007.
