Senay Aydim and Sanem Öge in Present Tense


Quiet desperation in Istanbul

Documentary filmmaker Belmin Söylemez focoses in her, beautiful, atmospheric feature debut on an enigmatic woman called Mina (Sanem Öge), recently divorced and living alone in Istanbul, who dreams of escaping to the US, though there is an air of patient hopelessness about her. She is about to be evicted from her apartment (the building is being turned into a hotel) and at the film's start works as a cipher in some big office. She gets a job as a fortune teller in a cafe reading coffee grounds and in this setting, is befriended by the owner Tayfon (Ozan Bilen), and another employe, Fezi (Senay Aydim), who are both as much adrift as she is. Through these associations and her fortune telling she begins ruminating about her past. People come and go; a recurrent trope of the film is the fortune telling. Mina's good at it; women often are pleased with her descriptions of their lives and like her, inviting her to private sessions. If only she could see into her own problems as well as she sees into other people's.

Söylemez constantly hovers around her protagonist, who projects a subtle blend of determination and exhaustion, with hints of other aspects, a serious accident as a child, poor relations with other family members. What little money she accumulates she puts into dollars, but she hasn't the documents or other requirements for study-travel to America and she floats in uncertain limbo.

Söylemez shows some influence of Iranian films. Her first documentary feature, the 2005, 34 Taxi, depicting Istanbul through cab rides, could be an idea of Kiarostami's. Here the screenplay written by the director and Hasmet Topaglu conveys a strong sense of urban ennui and alienation, and with it, to leaven the glumness, a pleasing mystery. And it doesn't hurt that as Jay Weissberg of Variety suggests, Sanem Öge looks a good deal like the young Juliette Binoche. He also rightly compliments Austrian dp Peter Roehsler whose work here is a continual pleasure to watch, for "his stately, mutedly rich lensing," in which figures together, sitting at the cafe to talk, say, are often framed formally and distantly "to gently emphasize their separation." The color Roehsler captures is delicately beautiful too, with much emphasis on yellow, turquoise (the word may come from "Turkey") and pale green, and there are many shots of the wonderfully complex bottoms of Turkish coffee cups: the possibility of seeing all the world in those scattered and hardened grounds has never been more evident.



Present Tense/şimdiki zaman, in Turkish, 110 mins., debuted at Sarajevo (April 2012), and was shown at Istanbul, where Sanem Öge was given the Best Actress award, Hamburg and Turin. It is included in the April-May 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. At the SFIFF Present Tense received the New Directors feature prize.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.