Zeki Demirkubuz. The Providence Phoenix

Home offers a look at those who used to tend the olive groves, an older generation attached to the earth, the seasons, and the past, now seemingly set for extinction. What about the new generation of apartment-block dwellers who’ve replaced them? Zeki Demirkubuz’s first film, Block C (1994; April 24 at 12:15 p.m., with the director hosting a discussion afterward), examines these lives of unquiet desperation, in particular that of Tülay (Serap Aksoy), the rich, disaffected wife of Selim (Selçuk Yöntem), whose main occupation seems to be smoking cigarettes and watching TV. Hell hath no fury like a woman bored, and Tülay is looking for trouble. She drives to the end of a deserted jetty and waits until the inevitable ruffians show up to harass her. She wanders through a park where, à la Blow-Up, she witnesses a crime (or does she?). But her curiosity is really piqued when she surprises her maid going at it with the janitor’s son, Halet (Fikret Kuskan). Mirroring her fragmented, dissociated behavior is Demirkubuz’s narrative structure and style. Much of the story unfolds in jagged flashbacks as Tülay relates it to a friend. Is it all a fantasy? Unlike the Selim of Away from Home, she hasn’t even one definite memory to cling to.

So is this Turkey’s future: sullen, bearded guys named Selim with crumbling relationships who watch TV and smoke too much? In fact, the hero of Demirkubuz’s newest film, The Waiting Room (2003; April 23 at 7:30 p.m. and May 1 at 1:15 p.m., with the director present at both screenings), is not Selim but Ahmet, and he’s played by the director himself. Ahmet is a kind of male counterpart to Tülay, except that he’s a film director. He’s widely esteemed but nonetheless feels worthless and is struggling to wrap up his adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Torpor overwhelms him at the prospect of work; indifference paralyzes him when it comes to his girlfriend. He invents one infidelity to get rid of her and another to lure in his adoring assistant, until she bores him too. He’s stirred briefly when he toys with the notion of casting a burglar he’s caught breaking into his place as Raskolnikov. But mostly he just watches TV and smokes.

Unlike most films about boredom, The Waiting Room is not boring itself but harrowing, and full of pathos and trenchant details. Ahmet had taken in a pregnant stray cat that flees when she gives birth; in vain he tries to get “the whore” to return to her litter. The third in the director’s “Tales of Darkness” trilogy, it leaves you both regretful and thankful there won’t be a fourth.

But Demirkubuz, who’s had considerable exposure in film festivals (the first two “Tales of Darkness” both appeared in the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival), is not the only Turkish director to have established himself as an auteur, or even the only one with a trilogy of sorts. Winner of Cannes’s Grand Jury Prize last year, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s third film, Distant (2003; April 22 at 7:30 p.m., April 24 at 3:40 p.m.; April 29 at 3:45 p.m., May 1 at 11 a.m., and May 2 at 10:30 a.m.), pursues the same themes as his previous two — the gulf between one’s origins and one’s fate, between the deprivation of the old ways and the alienation of the new — but without the Kiarostami-like self-reflexivity of those works. Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir, who played a filmmaker in Ceylan’s second film, Clouds of May) is a wanna-be Tarkovsky (he watches Solaris on his VCR but switches to porn) who has fled his rustic roots to make his dreams come true in Istanbul, his version of New York. At age 40, however, he’s resigned himself to a comfortable career photographing ceramic tiles. His estranged wife is about to repatriate in Canada with her new husband, and his only constant companion is a mouse that he tries without success to eradicate. And that, except for smoking and watching TV, is pretty much Mahmut’s life until a cousin from the old village turns up. Laid off by the local factory, Yusuf (played by Ceylan’s real-life cousin, the late Mehmet Emin Toprak, co-winner with Özdemir of the Cannes 2003 Best Actor Award) hopes to crash at Mahmut’s place until he gets a job on a ship, or whatever. A subtle, slower, and much darker Odd Couple, Distant lives up to its title, glimpsing a void of alienation that transcends nation and history and engulfs East and West, past and future alike.

Peter Keough. The Providence Phoenix. April 16-22, 2004.