MovieTime

Review

by Julie Rigg

In the port city of Hamburg the prostitutes in the red light district sit in doors and windows, as they do in Amsterdam, so the customers can check them out.

Ali, a wily Turkish man, finds a blonde he likes. She calls herself Jessy. But Ali, an elderly widower, detects a fellow countrywoman under the blond wig. He becomes a regular, then makes her an offer: come live with him, sleep only with him and he will support her. She refuses, but when she is threatened by two radical Islamists if she doesn't give up her 'immoral life', she changes her mind, and moves in with him. She also gets to know his grown son, who is the immigrant success story; a professor of German literature at a German university. He's a thoughtful man, very different from his blunt, lascivious father.

Jessy's real name is Yetel, and she has a daughter, Ayteh, studying in Istanbul, who thinks her mother works in a shoe store. Yetel misses her. Then she dies.

I am giving nothing away in telling you this because the first part of this magnificent, sprawling three-act film is called 'The Death of Yetel'. How she dies is important, and I will leave you to discover this. But Nejat, Ali's son, decides he must travel to Istanbul to find Ayteh and tell her of her mother's death.

The second story in this film belongs to Ayteh, and to Lotte, a young German student who finds and shelters Ayteh when she in turn comes to Hamburg seeking her mother. They become lovers: but Lotte's mother, Susanne, disapproves of her sheltering a girl who is an illegal refugee. She has a complacent faith in the beneficence of the German state. And she fails to understand her daughter.

All these stories come together in the third act of this film, in Istanbul.
The long journey will take us to middle class Istanbul, and Hamburg, to bookshops and universities, to tourist hotels, inside bureaucratic offices, and refugee shelters and a Turkish prison, and to a tiny village where elderly Anatolians still till the soil.

At the centre of this magnificent, sprawling drama are big questions about love, and death, and the relationships between parents and children. What do we, as adult children, owe our parents? What do we as parents owe our adult children? Where do loyalties lie?

It's an ambitious film, and people are at the heart of it. Such a huge canvas, such daring shifts in time-frame and memory would not work at all if we did not believe in the people. But Akin succeeds where a more conventional filmmaker may have failed, because these people are not ciphers: they are real, and they are looking for love, and dealing with loss, making moral choices. His shrewd observations of two cultures or, indeed, many cultures within two societies provide a context that shape the choices of six people, but the characters are so much more. And the drama holds.

Fatih Akin is an authentic talent: astonishingly, for a filmmaker just turned 35, he has now made five feature films; and found his own voice. It is a bold one, and a thoughtful one. There are no easy resolutions here.

The German sociologist George Simmel famously observed that the stranger entering a society or a group sees what those who live there take for granted. Perhaps it is no accident that some of the best storytelling in our globalised world comes from those who traverse two cultures. It happened with literature first, now indeed it is happening in cinema, and Akin is one of its fine new voices.

Director: Fatih Akin
Cast: Nurgül Yesilçay, Baki Davrak, Tancel Kurtiz, Hanna Sychgulla, Patrycia Ziolkowska, Nursel Kose
Producer: Fatih Akin, Klaus Maeck, Andrea Thiel, Jeanette Wurl
Script: Fatih Akin
Cinematographer: Rainer Klausmann
Editor: Andrew Bird
Music: Shantel
Running time: 112
Australian distributor: Sharmill Films
Language: German
Classification: MA15+