At the beginning of Turkish director Zeki Demirkuboz’s long-awaited and frustratingly misjudged Life — the director’s first film in seven years, and now serving as a Turkish international feature film being submitted for the Oscars — a young woman named Hekran escapes the claws of an impending scheme. Marriage disappears.
We learn a lot, not from Hicran at first, but from the men in her orbit, as the likes of her awkward father and distraught ex-fiancé drop Hicran’s name in conversations and ponder the circumstances surrounding her mysterious journey. Quickly, it seems useful to keep hearing the word “hekran,” a feminine name common enough in Turkey (where this reviewer is from) that roughly translates to “longing,” or rather the intense pain one feels because of longing. This is because it is not an accidental choice of name here, as everyone in “life” seems to be longing for something or someone.
The problem is that Demirkuboz almost stubbornly shows that he is far more concerned about (and even sympathetic toward) the unmet needs and growing pains of the men in Hekran’s path, despite the fact that they are, in various ways, oppressors of Hekran and countless women like her, in a society where no… A large portion of the population still adheres to patriarchal values. So, while Hekran is gradually revealed to be the main hero of the story, Demirkuboz leaves her desires and dreams strangely ambiguous, often putting them on the back burner. In that, when Hekran (Mireille Danner, perceptive and quietly commanding) enters the film in flesh and blood, she remains mostly silent, quietly angry, and often inaudibly dissatisfied. But her silence does not seem like simmering rebellion, nor complete surrender. Most of the time, she rambles on about her own story — all three hours and thirteen minutes of it — like an afterthought, when a group of men who have directly and indirectly made her life a living hell come on about their fragility. Vanity.
The fiancé Hekran runs away from, Reza (Burak Dakkak), is among the eligible men. Even though he has only seen Hijran once or twice, and against the protests of his grandfather (Osman Alcaş), Reza feels that Hijran should have confronted him and explained in detail why she doesn’t want to marry him (as if forcing her into an arranged marriage isn’t a good thing). is not a sufficient reason). And so he leaves his picturesque town in the Black Sea region, heading to Istanbul to search for the woman who, in his opinion, has done him dirty.
For a while, we follow Reza through inelegant cuts and needlessly drawn-out scenes, as his friends and relatives living with their own set of fantasies briefly enter the picture. When he finally takes matters into his own hands as the disturbed Travis Bickle does, and kills the perpetrator who allegedly forced Heckran into sex work (although there is no indication that Heckran is considering a life as a sex worker), he is taken out of the film for a while, Leaving the arena to other unsavory men who think they know what’s best for Hicran. One of them is Orhan (Cem Davran), an older, relatively liberal-minded teacher. Hekran agrees to marry to find some relief from her conservative father, but realizes that he is just a simple-minded, insecure man who is jealous for no apparent reason. . The other is Mehmet (Umut Kurt), Hekran’s morally bankrupt father who frequently beats his wife and calls his defiant daughter a “bitch.”
It might have been different if the text, which insists on being as neutral an observer as possible towards Hekran, had the same attitude towards these men of toxic credentials – showing us their behavior relentlessly, and leaving us clear lessons to draw. But gradually, a troubling pattern emerges in Life — like the villain’s origin story, the film often goes out of its way to over-explain the roots of the males’ mistakes, coming dangerously close to saying, “Men have their reasons, too.” With empathy. As a result, one loses patience with such misjudged priorities, especially given the current climate in Türkiye. In a country where women and their allies march under the banner “Femicide is not random, it is political,” seeking an end to patriarchal madness, this inept attitude to “life” seems alarming.
Equally unfortunate is the film’s narrative clumsiness, with a story that’s not worth its exhausting runtime. And to bring in another Turkish composer with a penchant for longer and slower rhythms, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, for example, knows how to infuse every little moment with catchy tunes. By contrast, “Life” (featuring the two cinematographers from Ceylan’s recent and masterful “Of Dry Weeds”) feels careless and uninterestingly slow. While the film’s committed performances and authentic sense of place hold one’s attention, it does not distract from the deeper problems of “The Life,” which doesn’t seem to have anything meaningful to say about the epidemic of toxic masculinity.
“Life” is not the first time Demirkoboz has depicted obsessive, self-destructive behavior in men. (In fact, Fate (2006), one of his earlier films on the subject, appears briefly on television in Life.) But this may be the first time such behavior has unequivocally won out in the finale of “Demirkoboz.” image. To give up a necessary spoiler, Hicran, in the end, happily surrenders to her supposed savior Rıza—a gun-toting avenger who, for all we know, might have killed Hicran instead of her pimp. As “life” comes to an end, we see the couple unambiguously happy, and Hakran happily pregnant. Was she tired of fighting and resigned to her inevitable fate out of relief? Or has she already fallen in love with Reza? If so, the film seems quite pleased with the depressing outcome. If the latter, the suggestion that you can find romance with a stalker who kills out of passion seems even more troubling.