QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
The word ‘lo-fi’ appears only near the very end – although chronologically the beginning – in writer anddirector Alican Durbaş’ feature debut of the same name, as Emre (Furkan Kalabalik) tells his girlfriend Defne (Ceren Koç) of his wish that there were an online playlist of lo-fi tracks to play while painting an apartment’s interior. Still the word of the title resonates throughout a film which presents a certain simplicity: a single-location setting in a small upstairs Turkish apartment near the sea; a narrative spanning – or seeming to span – a single day; and a striking aesthetic achieved in-camera with entirely analogue lighting effects. Not to mention the low-stakes nature of it all, as Emre sleeps and slacks and eventually, with the help of two hilarious removalists and a friend, moves out.
Yet for all its apparent lo-fi nature, this film comes with reverberating depths. That single, final day telescopes to accommodate all the days that Emre has spent in the apartment with Defne – days which come flooding back in memories that overlap with each other and confound time. And while Emre may seem just a feckless thirtysomething layabout who likes nothing more than lying in bed, in fact he is quietly suffering loneliness, depression and agoraphobia, and does not seem quite ready to move on. And if Defne is his literal dream girl, visiting when he snoozes or in his reveries, he is also unpacking – and then repacking – the bad times with her as well as the good, the frictions and irritations and petty squabbles.
Meanwhile, despite the constrained setting, Lo-Fi comes with an unusually rich visual texture that is also a concise history of the moving image and the play of light. Fairy lights shift in and out of focus. The moon’s reflection is multiplied into abstract animation. Neon gels on the windows cast strange colours over everything. Defne moves and dances in silhouette behind a shower curtain. Rooms are lit with smartphone torches, candles and broken lamps, while the smoke from a joss stick or the steam from a shower warps and distorts the optic spectrum. And at one point widely distributed cardboard flats and a pinhole transform the entire apartment into a camera obscura, uncannily projecting an inverted image of the street below onto the interior walls and ceiling. What Durbas and his DP Ahmed Sinan Sahin have achieved here is simply breathtaking, turning a collection of small, often dark rooms into the canvases for a kind of cinematic impressionism.
Although it is the opposite of frightening, Lo-Fi is really a ghost story. Defne had suggested that one inner wall should be reserved for drawings to inspire their dreams, and another for photographs to trigger their memories – and now Emre flits between both these states, haunted by Defne’s absence, and unable to separate her from the place they once shared. So for him, Defne is still there, her trace encoded in every nook and cranny – and so he conjures her, converses with her, clowns with her and argues with her, in a reprise of all the times they spent together there. For here, a place retains the echoes of the people who have inhabited it, their presence caught in the layers of items lost and found, and of paint on the wall – and while Emre may be fixated on, even stuck in, his past relationship, the more he rehearses it, the more it stays the same, including its prescribed unhappy ending. The only way forward is to talk to the real Defne rather than the idea of her in his head, and to put down new roots in another apartment. Accordingly this highly compressed breakup movie is an oddly disorienting portrait of a couple, of a location and of the fluidity of time itself.
Lo-Fi just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
