Review: Ghosts (2020)
Directed by Azra Deniz Okyay; screenplay by Azra Deniz Okyay; starring Dilayda Günes, Beril Kayar and Nalan Kuruçim.
An interesting and enlightening film with moments of pure life.
Ghosts follows four characters as their lives intertwine over the course of a nationwide blackout in Turkey in a dramatic subgenre that must at some point be named (Babel does this, Magnolia too, even Pulp Fiction).
Three of the characters are women, a feminist (Beril Kayar), a dancer (Dilayda Günes) and a mother (Nalan Kuruçim) whose son is being extorted whilst in prison, all struggling to live in the so-called New Turkey; a state in the process of rampant gentrification to pave over the undesirables and dissidents. The final character is a ruthless middleman (Emrah Ozdemir), with his fingers in many different pies, but perhaps most crucially involved in destabilising old buildings a contractor friend isn't legally allowed to knock down himself for development.
I admittedly know very little about the situation in Turkey, so this film was a bit of a crash-course/brief introduction to many of the issues faced there today. The film, written and directed by Azra Deniz Okyay, depicts the underprivileged of the country floating about in a kind of liminal space - not really belonging anywhere and not being allowed to either. These are the titular ghosts. They aren't welcome where they are, but are tethered there nonetheless.
Location and housing are crucial to the film in the sense that nowhere is really safe for the characters. At one point the feminist, looking after a group of kids is thrown out on the street for no real concrete reason. In another, the dancer and her friends are moved along by the police for simply dancing in a corner near a block of apartments. In yet another, the dancer, seeking revenge against her boyfriend and unable to find him, goes to his apartment and trashes it as a substitute.
Another key element of the film is the sense of progress and change in as much as two different kinds of change are clearly being pitted against one another. On the one hand, we have a kind of social change in the younger characters, an increase in their liberal views, a desire to be free from the pains of the older generation. On the other, this is the introduction of New Turkey, a shiny beacon, but not one for those in the film. In a scene that is for all intents and purposes just being used as a transition, we see the middleman staring up at a new block of apartments before turning back to the older buildings surrounding him. The scene is played impartially and without judgment but it appears simultaneously to show what is being fought for.
This man has bought into the idea of New Turkey but clings throughout the film to entirely antiquated ideals and beliefs. He, when he first appears for a split second, is a kind of beacon of hope to the mother it seems. She herself is looking for money to save her son, and this man, clearly well off from his appearance and clothing offers it to her. But she outright refuses. It's a moment of pause and confusion and is never explicitly addressed again, but taken with the rest of the film is in keeping with the message. The middleman is glossy and looks well to do, but entirely ugly and barbaric beneath.
And the mother's story is also emblematic of this kind of conflict. In the end, the mother's decision on how to save her son falls to two men. The middleman's money, or a drug dealer's job.
The film's success is in how it depicts the liveliness and quiet resistance of the three women. The intermittent dancing scenes are hopeful and play out alternately with music both in and out of the diegesis. Rather similarl to the films of Celine Sciamma, these are the rare moments the film strays temporarily from its strict social realist sensibility. Further, there are a number of party scenes, showing the joys of the rebellion of the feminist and her friends, their solidarity and resistance. This liveliness and resistance are shown to coincide, so as not to reduce the main characters to pained sob stories for the magnanimous viewer to feel bad about.
The one issue I did have with the film was its slightly confusing structure never entirely felt justified. I suppose this is a dilemma with this subgenre in general, that it can often come across as a slightly vain exercise in technical skill rather than being in anyway meaningful to the film. The structure does conjure a sense of intimacy within the community the characters inhabit, but other than that, it just serves to confuse and pad the runtime it seems, rehashing many moments with very little extra meaning added after seeing how each character got where.
Watched on 17th April 2020