QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The unfortunate victim of the overzealous judiciary is Alper (Boran Kuzum), a dedicated up-and-coming prosecutor. He has supported the systematic overreach of the justice system. When his mother is accused of gluttony, his world falls off its axis.

He and his father watch the apartment cleared of any trace of her. Then his name, a remnant of his mother, is forcefully changed to Arin. Struggling to follow his father’s advice and forget, he bottles up his grief, and it comes pouring out in the middle of a “funeral spread” he and his father host for friends to “celebrate the death of the guilty deceased.” Under the scrutinising eyes of the Honourable Members of the Committee, the evening is brought to a premature end. Soon Alper is facing the wrath of the law, which gives him a nine-day deadline to correct himself and forget his mother. Failure to comply risks him and his father winding up penniless and homeless.

The House With No Address is filled with an inventive and sometimes understated wit. Aşkın studiously controls the tempo, ensuring the humour doesn’t overwhelm or detract from the dystopian world building and deeper narrative themes of coercion, suppression and cancel culture. With great sensitivity, the film recognises the importance of memory in the human experience. Aşkın’s debut feature benefits from the material’s humour and seriousness, emotional warmth and despair. These work as a series of carefully calibrated checks and balances that hold together the film’s tonal structure.

The question arises whether we are watching a pre-determined narrative unfold, one authored by Aşkın, or are we experiencing a dream or nightmare of someone we have not been introduced to? Could it be that we are inside Alper’s unconscious mind, and by the film’s end, anything we glean is unreliable information?

Meanwhile, the set design, for example, the red frosted, circular window in the apartment building’s corridor evokes an otherworldly or dreamlike sensibility. A useful comparison is to consider the roots of world building lying in hand-drawn or animated pictures, as well as Wes Anderson’s cinema. The House With No Address flirts with this same quirkiness, but Aşkın possesses a humility, an introverted authorial presence that contrasts with Anderson’s stronger presence.

Aşkın isn’t content to create an exclusively thematic or intellectually centred story but seeks to create an experience that satisfies her audience emotionally and creatively in its world building. To effectively create a sensory and emotional experience, she must suspend our disbelief and herein lies a contradiction. Or it’s less a contradiction and an inevitability that the audience’s suspension of disbelief is always in parallel to their conscious and critical awareness. The House With No Address enjoys winking at its audience, who are in on the joke. In fact, Alper and his father seem in on the joke, although they’re never allowed to brazenly show it because the film’s integrity must be preserved.

Inevitably, Aşkın’s film enters into direct conversation with novels such as Franz Kafka’s The Trial and George Orwell’s 1984—about the opposition to, or pursuit to understand bureaucratic power structures that seek to replace God. Alper’s awakening or metamorphosis to opposite the system he once advocated for, calls to mind Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey. It’s important to not get lost in the details and keep an eye on the bigger picture. What we witness is hubris overcome by humility. Whether it can be equated to empathy is uncertain, but it can be described, not literally, as his Saul on the road to Damascus episode. His mother’s deletion is the blinding light that confronts Alper and compels him to change.

Regardless of the comparison, The House With No Address’s effectiveness lies jointly in the world building and the comedic wit, visual and verbal, and the humanity of Alper’s moral and ideological shift. At its heart, Aşkın’s feature debut is a film about choosing compassion, kindness, understanding and tolerance over our worst inclinations. It’s also a film about redemption and advocates for us to be proactive and not reactive in pursuing our better angels.

The House With No Address just premiered in the First Feature Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.