Robert A. Haller. Confession: Tales About Darkness II. Five Films by Zeki Demirkubuz.

This film is the second in the yet uncompleted trilogy and is very different—more of a mystery story than Demirkubuz’s other films—and may be Demirkubuz’s best film to date. It resembles the detective novels of the late American writer Ross Macdonald. For Macdonald the torments of his characters were caused by events from long ago that were repressed but not permanently buried. In Confession the principal character, Harun (Taner Birsel), is an engineer whose pursuit of what is destroying his marriage leads him back into his past and that of his wife, Nilgun. The two share a history of betrayal and a failure of coming to terms with their actions. Although Confession resembles Block C in theme and in cinematic structure, I will refrain from discussing the details of the narrative so viewers can make their own discoveries.

In Confession, Demirkubuz uses another of his signature images: the nighttime drive on a highway. There is such a drive early in the film, accomplished with a sensual skill as highway dividing lines “dash” beneath the car while the overhead street lamps are eclipsed one by one by the car’s forward motion (nor should the long rear-view images be overlooked). Demirkubuz is a poet of wanderers and of highways that lead across the landscape of Turkey. In this, he shares a kinship with Omer Kavur whose protagonists also travel across memory, space, and time.  

Unlike Musa in Fate, Harun is compelled to look into the past, to inquire into the festering wound that haunts his wife and himself, reducing him to fits of rage and weeping, and her to resolute silence. The emotional intensity—the rawness and its depth—is what sets this film apart from Demirkubuz’s other films.

Demirkubuz’s abrupt style of editing is well suited to this story. Large periods are skipped across with no notice. Years pass by in a flash but there is a clarity of moral vision at work. Near the end, one of the characters remarks that “Nothing is over. It is the time that passes.”  Not quite true: sympathy and acceptance can be nurtured in Demirkubuz’s world.

Robert A. Haller. Films by Zeki Demirkubuz. 2003.