QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM BERLIN

Derya (Özgü Namal) is a successful theatre actress performing for a major show in Ankara. Her husband Aziz (Tansu Biçer) is a university professor and playwright, deeply involved in the career of his spouse. They think that their art can change the world (or at least their native Turkey), a thought scornfully dismissed by their teenage daughter Ezgi, who is more concerned about spending time with her friends. Dark political forces throw a spanner in the works of the loving couple, and they must suddenly terminate their play, leaving cast and sell-out audiences stunned.

The family moves to Istanbul in order to evade political persecution. They move in with Aziz’s mother. Derya devotes herself to less transgressive gigs, with the helping hand of a savvy agent that saw her on stage back in Ankara. Aziz becomes a taxi driver in order to make ends meet. And Ezgi finds herself a boyfriend. The artistic family don’t give up theatre as means of political expression. They organise a play entitled Yellow Letters (in reference to the mysterious documents that led to the demise of their previous spectacle), featuring full frontal nudity. Meanwhile, Aziz grapples with a defamation lawsuit because the Turkish government deems his writings insulting.

Yellow Letters‘s most distinctive feature is the literal transplantation of the setting onto German soil. Ankara becomes Berlin and Istanbul becomes Hamburg. This means that the action is filmed as if it was taking place in the two Turkish cities, except that everything is filmed in the respective German cities. A very audacious creative choice. The objective is clear: 42-year-old Turkish-German director İlker Çatak wishes to highlight that such a political film could never be filmed in oppressive Turkey. Criticism of autocratic Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a no-go in the arts. The mere presence of a politically-loaded documentary shockingly led to the suspension of the 60th Antalya Film Festival in 2023, the oldest such event in the Middle East.

The artistic device sounds extremely commendable. Sadly, it fails on every conceivable level. Firstly, there is no apparent connection between the chosen cities – political, artistic or visual. The correlations are without reason or rhyme. The fact that Berlin and Ankara are the country capitals is the only vaguely coherent element. Germany looks nothing like Turkey, and the fact that people speak and behave Turkish makes the action extremely awkward. The director makes every effort to conceal every little street sign and magazine cover in order to erase the German language. He only makes an exception for the words “Im Namen des Volkes” (“in the name of the people”, in free translation) inside a German court – for no apparent reason. It feels more or less like a listening to an audiobook while watching a different movie.

Images of protests – pro Palestine, pro-LGBT and anti-Russian War – are featured multiple times in the film. These too were captured in Germany. The purpose is to promote Germany as a place of safe political activism. That’s very problematic. Proposing the country that vigorously oppresses pro-Palestine expression (even the Berlinale itself is included here) as the land of free speech is insincere, disingenuous and frankly insulting to our intelligence. This is political whitewashing of the cheapest variety.

And this isn’t the only problem with Yellow Letters. The film is so vague in its politics that it’s entirely anodyne. There’s mention of anti-terrorism, anti-war and a brief presentation of Kurdish artists, however nothing concrete about Turkish politics. If you knew little about the internal politics of Turkey before watching Yellow Letters, you will understand even less by the time the film is finished. One would presume that moving the production onto European soil (the film explicitly alluded to perceived European freedoms, such as in the nudity scene) would enable audacity, or at least some precise criticism of Erdogan. Such is not the case.

To boot, the script is boring, the acting stagey, and the interactions excessively prosaic. There is nothing to salvage here. Yellow Letters is overbloated, pointless and interminable with a duration of 128 minutes. Spare yourself the trouble and go to the theatre instead.

Yellow Letters just premiered in the Official Competition of the 76th Berlinale.