‘Life’ Review: Turkey’s Oscar Submission Loses the Plot on Toxic Masculinity
At the start of Turkish auteur Zeki Demirkubuz’s long-awaited and frustratingly miscalculated “Life” — the filmmaker’s first movie in seven years, now serving as Turkey’s international feature submission to the Academy Awards —a young woman named Hicran flees the claws of an impending arranged marriage and goes into hiding.
We learn as much, not from Hicran at first, but from the men in her orbit, as the likes of her embarrassed dad and distraught former fiancé drop Hicran’s name in conversations and ponder the circumstances surrounding her mysterious flight. Quickly, it feels pointed to keep hearing the word “Hicran,” a common-enough female name in Turkey (where this critic is from) that roughly translates as “longing,” or rather, the intense pain one feels out of longing. That’s because it’s anything but an accidental name choice here, as everyone in “Life” seems to be yearning for something or someone.
More from Variety
The trouble is Demirkubuz almost stubbornly demonstrates that he is a lot more interested in (and even sympathetic towards) the unmet needs and growing aches of the men in Hicran’s path, despite the fact that they are, in various ways, the oppressors of Hicran and countless other women like her, in a society where a considerable portion of the population still holds onto patriarchal values. So while Hicran is gradually revealed to be the main protagonist of the story, Demirkubuz leaves her desires and dreams curiously vague, often placing them on the back-burner. In that, when Hicran (a perceptive and quietly commanding Miray Daner) enters the film in flesh and blood, she remains mostly silent, quietly irate, and often inaudibly dissatisfied. But her silence neither feels like a simmering rebellion, nor outright submissiveness. For the most part, she just wanders around her own story — all three hours and thirteen minutes of it — like an afterthought, when a group of men who have, directly and indirectly, turned her life into hell do all the talking about their fragile egos.
The fiancé that Hicran runs away from, R?za (Burak Dakak), is chief among those entitled men. Despite having only seen Hicran once or twice, and against his wholesome grandfather’s (Osman Alka?) protests, R?za feels Hicran should have faced him and explained in detail why she doesn’t want to marry him (as if being forced into an arranged marriage isn’t valid enough a reason). And so he leaves his picturesque Black Sea region town behind, heading to Istanbul to look for the woman who, in his mind, has done him dirty.
For a while, we follow R?za through inelegant cuts and needlessly drawn-out scenes, as his friends and relatives living with their own set of delusions briefly enter the picture. And when he finally takes matters in his own hands like a disturbed Travis Bickle would, murdering the perpetrator that has allegedly forced Hicran into sex work (even though there is no suggestion that Hicran minds living as a sex worker), he exits the film for a while, leaving the arena to other deeply unpleasant dudes who think they know what’s best for Hicran. One is Orhan (Cem Davran), an older and relatively liberal-minded educator Hicran agrees to marry to find some relief from her conservative dad, only to realize that he is just another simple-minded, insecure guy who gets jealous for no apparent reason. The other is Mehmet (Umut Kurt), Hicran’s morally bankrupt father who frequently beats his wife and casually calls his defiant daughter, “a whore.”
It would have been one thing if the script that insists upon being as impartially observational as possible towards Hicran had the same attitude towards these toxically entitled men — showing us their behavior unsparingly, and leaving the obvious lessons for us to extract. But gradually, a disturbing pattern emerges in “Life” — like a villain origin story, the film often goes out of its way to over-explain the root of male wrongdoings, coming dangerously close to saying, “Men have their reasons, too” with sympathy. Consequently, one does lose patience with such misjudged priorities, especially considering the current climate of Turkey. In a country where women and their allies march underneath “Women killings are not random, they are political” banners, seeking an end to the patriarchal madness, this inept stance in “Life” feels troubling.
Equally unfortunate is the film’s narrative clumsiness, with a story that doesn’t earn its exhausting runtime. To bring up another Turkish auteur with an affinity towards longer and slower rhythms, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, for instance, knows how to infuse every small moment with arresting grace notes. In contrast, “Life” (sharing the two cinematographers of Ceylan’s recent, masterful “About Dry Grasses”) just feels carelessly and insipidly sluggish. While the film’s committed performances and authentic sense of place hold one’s attention, they don’t distract from the deeper problems in “Life,” which doesn’t seem to have anything meaningful to say on the toxic masculinity epidemic.
“Life” isn’t the first time Demirkubuz has depicted self-destructively obsessive behavior in men. (In fact “Destiny” (2006), one of his earlier films on the topic, makes a brief appearance on a TV screen in “Life.”) But this might be the first time such behavior unequivocally wins in the conclusion of a Demirkubuz picture. To give away a necessary spoiler, Hicran, in the end, happily submits to her supposed rescuer R?za — a gun-toting avenger who, for all we know, might have murdered Hicran instead of her pimp. As “Life” reaches its finale, we see the couple unambiguously happy, and Hicran, happily pregnant. Has she grown tired of fighting and just submitted to her inevitable fate out of convenience? Or did she really fall for R?za? If it’s the former, the film seems almost too pleased with the grating outcome. If it’s the latter, the suggestion that you can find romance with a stalker who murders out of passion feels all the more disconcerting.
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
