QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM MALTA

Riza Uysal (Burak Dakak) is in his early 20s, and he lives a largely unaccomplished and unfulfilled life. His only source of affection is his doting yet quickly ageing grandpa. He feels guilty and unaroused when a prostitute gives him a fellatio. Plus Covid has partly brought the world to a standstill. He deposits all of his faith in the marriage to the astoundingly beautiful Hicran (Miray Daner), of around the same age. The problem is that he only met twice. She suddenly disappears, and he travels to the Turkish capital in order to locate the mysterious woman, and ask her some questions. Did he do something wrong? Or was she simply seeking something else? Riza relies mostly on an old picture of Hicran in order to craft a memory of his intended wife-t0-be.

Fifty-nine-year old director Zeki Demirkubuz seeks to delve deep into the psychology of his two protagonists, and there is no shortage of time for that. Life has a duration of 193 minutes (a whopping three hours and 13 minutes), indeed a lifetime. The filmmaker reveals a type of masculinity obsessed with possessing and controlling women, often to perceivably noble purposes. This unchallenged behaviour is not confined to Riza, and extends to pretty all of the male characters in the film. The question (which remains firmly answered) is whether Hicran is seeking liberation from this patriarchal prison. Her motives are wholly ambiguous. It is the male gaze that dominates the film. The female remains an elusive and equivocal object of fascination, fear and adoration.

Flawed and deceitful characters punctuate the rest of the movie, While in Istanbul, Riza stays with a friend who pretends to be at university so that his parents send him money. He is proud of his demeanour, and Riza “envies” his confidence. Hicran’s father is violent and abusive, and her mother is passive and protective of the entire family. Yet Hicran loves her dad and despises her mum, whom she dismisses as “weak” and “spiritless”. These characters are multidimensional and emotionally complex, caught between tradition and subtle emancipative gestures, between shattered dreams and fortuitous serendipities. Simple people.seeking simple answers, trapped by deceptive events. Demirkubuz rejects didacticism and facile takeaways. Instead, he simply asks viewers to recognise the fallibility and vulnerability of his characters.

A couple of dream sequences throw what looked like a straightforward story into disarray, injecting poetic and allegorical devices into the narrative. This is clearly intentional. The enigmatic nature of the story is reaffirmed with a single sentence, in film’s very final minute. Yet this is Nuri Bilge Ceylan. While the extremely long runtime is indeed consistent with the films of Turkey’s most acclaimed filmmaker (such as 2017’s The Wild Pear Tree and last year’s About Dry Grasses), Life does not possess the deep ruminative tone and the exuberant cinematography os his films. Still, a worthwhile experience if you have the time and the patience. This is a movie with the potential to linger in your dreams.

Life is in the Official Competition of the 2nd Mediterrane Film Festival, in Malta. It won the Golden Bee for Best Film, the event’s top prize.