The Daily Star - Arts & Culture - Man, God, passion and rent collection

The Daily Star - Arts & Culture - Man, God, passion and rent collection
Man, God, passion and rent collection
Part of Metropolis’ ‘New Turkish Cinema’ cycle, ‘Tavka’ journeys into religion and sin
By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 17, 2011
BEIRUT: Broadly speaking, there are sacred films (that is, movies about religious folks) and profane films – about the world and its array of photogenic and stimulating sorts of sin.
Hypothetically speaking, both sacred and profane films can be made from an insider’s perspective or an outsider’s perspective. In practice, though, filmmakers tend to be profane creatures, so movies about secular life glisten with gleeful verisimilitude in a way that flicks about piety do not.
Films that try to conjure up the movement of characters from a comprehensible secular world to the exotic realm of militant belief have their work cut out for them – whether because of a filmmaker’s predispositions or the shortcomings of moving pictures.
Take “The Yacoubian Building,” the 2006 hit by Egyptian director Marwan Hamed. The movie looks at contemporary Cairo through a nostalgic lens that is explicitly cosmopolitan and secular.
This may explain why the shots of the eponymous apartment building are warmly lit and richly textured, while the world of radical Islam (glimpsed after one of the characters becomes an Islamist militant) seems flat and frigid as a dentist’s office.
“Shahada,” (2010) by Germany’s Burhan Qurbani, is similarly hamstrung. On one hand, a hijab-wearing Muslim woman has no compunctions about an adulterous sexual relationship – a commendable gesture for its bringing some nuance to representations of Muslims.
On the other hand, the film’s central story tries to chart the increasing, Islam-inflected intolerance of a secular young woman of Turkish heritage, but finds it necessary to tie her (increasingly crazed) behavior to a post-abortion haemorrhage.
So there is something intriguing, even refreshing, about Özer Kızıltan’s 2006 feature-film debut “Takva: A Man’s Fear of God,” screening this week at Metropolis Cinema-Sofil as part of its seven-film “New Turkish Cinema” cycle.
The film recounts the tale of Muharrem (Erkan Can), a resident of contemporary Istanbul whose life is so modest and pious you might imagine he’s a character in an historical drama.
Muharrem works as an apprentice (aka jack of all trades) for Ali Bey (Settar Tanriogen), an Istanbul sack merchant, to whom he was somehow “given” as a child. Nowadays middle-aged and uneducated, unmarried and innocent of the world, Muharrem’s life is a simple one.
It swings in a regular metronome from daytime labor to evenings at his neighborhood (apparently Qadiri) Sufi zawiya (monastery), where he takes part in those exercises in communal ecstasy that folks have come to associate with this approach to Islamic practice.
Cinematographer Soykut Turan renders these sequences of genuine passion with a tour de force of grace and power.
The only fly in the ointment is the beautiful young woman who haunts his dreams. Every time he sleeps, it seems, he finds himself having sweaty sex with this succubus, a passion so powerful it jars him into wakefulness and sends him scurrying to clean himself off, begging god’s forgiveness the whole way.
Unbeknownst to him, big changes are brewing in Muharrem’s life.
His Sheikh (Meray Ülgen) has decided he needs someone to collect the rents of the order’s real estate holdings around Istanbul.
The Sheikh’s quisling Rauf (Güven Kiraç) seems a little annoyed that he hasn’t been entrusted with the burden himself. The Sheikh explains that a man with a worldly and cultured mind like his is not necessarily appropriate for work of such temptation.
“The order, all its education facilities and soup kitchens survives on donations,” the Sheikh explains to the uncomprehending Muharrem. “Since the order benefits from worldly benefactors, someone must shoulder the burden of entering the world on the order’s behalf.”
The Sheikh duly drops around the sack company warehouse and tells Ali Bey that, from now on, the order will be needing Muharrem in the afternoons. There’s no question that Ali Bey will comply with the Sheikh’s request and he sets about hiring an assistant apprentice for the afternoons.
At the end of his first day on the job, the Sheikh informs Muharrem that he should make sure that, whenever assigning contracts to carry out repairs upon any of the order’s properties, all the contracts go to tradesmen who are members of the order.
As the order carries a big stick in the worldly environs of Istanbul, the Sheikh gives his new rent collector all the tools he’ll need to do his job in an efficient and unobtrusive manner – a mobile telephone, a different suit of clothes for every day of the week, a car and a driver, a member of the order, naturally.
When, after a spell on the job, his rent collector comports himself like a man with no interest whatsoever in worldly possessions, the Sheikh notes that Muharrem hasn’t yet found himself a wife and that, if he’s willing, he’ll donate his favorite daughter to serve in that capacity.
Feeling immensely guilty about the moments of involuntary nocturnal passion that regularly stain his underclothes, Muharrem turns down the offer, reassuring Rauf he long ago abandoned plans for married life.
He has already run into some job problems, trying to reconcile his own moral principles (what’s more important, the financial health of the order or that of the destitute family that cannot afford to pay rent?), when the denizens of Istanbul’s real estate development hear about him.
When fistfuls of American dollars drift into his guilty dreams of fantastic sex, Muharrem finds himself in a perplexing position.
Though not the most-recent feature to emerge from Turkey, “Takva” has received its share of critical praise, receiving the FIPRESCI (International Film Critics Guild) Prize at the 2007 Berlinale. The film attracted the attention of Western critics and audiences because its production company was that of German-Turkish filmmaking prodigy Fatih Akin, whose editor Andrew Bird also worked on the film.
The German’s fingerprints are all over “Takva,” but the guts of the thing are fully Turkish. Önder Çakar’s screenplay betrays an anthropological poignancy evident in the work of Turkey’s other young auteurs. The same is true of the performances – all the actors perform well and Erkan Can’s turn in the title role is superb.
The Germans’ expertise can be seen most obviously in the camera’s skillful rendering of the chaste hero’s carnal dream world. Here cinematographer and editors conspire to make stark, shocking juxtapositions of Sufi ecstasy with raw sexuality.
In other hands, this sort of thing could come off as no more than comic. Here the effect is to uproot audience expectations, creating empathy for a character quite unlike nearly everyone in the cinema.
“New Turkish Cinema” continues at Cinema Metropolis-Sofil until March 19. All films are projected in 35mm with English subtitles. For more information call 01-204-080 or see www.metropoliscinema.net.
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