Young Turk: Zeki Demirkubuz Makes Contemporary Turkish Cinema Universal and Personal

Melissa Starker. Young Turk: Zeki Demirkubuz Makes Contemporary Turkish Cinema Universal and Personal. Columbus Alive. 2003.

Among the young Turkish directors now finding audiences and acclaim worldwide is 38-year-old Zeki Demirkubuz, distinguished in 2002 as the only director ever to have two feature films shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the same year.

From his 1994 debut, Block C, about a woman who becomes obsessed with her neighbors to the exclusion of her own existence, Demirkubuz displayed a minimalist style touched by Italian neo-realism. Most of his films are centered around apartment complexes, where every residence’s door hides a story—the devastating suspicion and infidelity between a married couple in Confession or a neighbor’s brutal abuse at her husband’s hands in The Third Page, the two most universally compelling films in the series. Directors usually pull out this trick as a shortcut to get chummy with an audience through pop-culture touchstones. In Fate, a deadpan rumination on one office worker’s complete alienation from life (inspired by Camus’ The Stranger), the main character instinctively grabs for the leg of the female co-worker sitting beside him in a movie theater; while she diffidently fights off his advances, Bill Pullman tries to counter an alien invasion in Independence Day. Turkish movie posters line the walls and fuel the fantasies of Isa, the out-of-luck television extra in The Third Page. This tactic affects the bones of the director’s films as well. He adopted the style of vintage Turkish melodramas to comment on the past and present in the love triangle Innocence, something Todd Haynes did recently (and more overtly) with his Douglas Sirk homage, Far From Heaven.

Most unexpectedly, Demirkubuz twists the lower-class social drama, The Third Page, into something that feels exactly like film noir, down to the dramatic use of darkness. The director also has a regular habit, like Hitchcock, of showing up in his own films. (He’s right behind his protagonist, partially obscured, at the Independence Day screening, and in Confession, he’s seen as the portrait of the protagonist’s dead best friend.)

Confession is compared to Eyes Wide Shut; but unlike Kubrick (at least to this viewer), Demirkubuz makes direct emotional contact. His characters aren’t dulled or idealized by a waking-dream atmosphere. They’re real, and many are approaching desperation. Demirkubuz has described Innocence as being about “people under pressure,” but the same could be said of virtually all of his films.

The problems of his characters are straightforward and familiar—paying the bills, finding love, worrying about the wife who might be cheating or the husband who isn’t holding up his end of family responsibility. Through them, without didacticism, the filmmaker questions the place each human has in the world and how it’s affected by internal thoughts and feelings.

Melissa Starker. Columbus Alive. 2003.