"Issiz Adam" (2008)

Alone (Turkish: Issız Adam) is a 2008 Turkish film written and directed byÇağan Irmak. The movie has received widespread interest from the Turkish media and had an outstanding performance in the box-office. The film's Turkish title Issız Adam is a triple entendre, as it can mean "Abandoned Man", "My Abandoned Island", and "My Lonely Ada", Ada being the name of the female lead character.

The film follows the lives of two people who live in Istanbul who happen to meet each other in a second-hand book shop. Alper is from Tarsus. He and Ada live different lives; Alper is a free-spirited man in his thirties who is the owner and the cook of a popular restaurant whereas Ada is a humble girl in her late twenties who designs child costumes for a living. Alper follows Ada to her shop after the initial meeting but she acts coldly towards him and insists that she doesn't want a serious relationship and throws coffee on him. She later calls him to apologize and Alper asks her out once more. She is reluctant at first but agrees to have dinner at his house and they end up sleeping together. It's the beginning of a moving relationship between them. But soon things begin to go wrong. Alper feels his freedom flying away and the need to utilize prostitutes, as he did before he met Ada. He can't bear the weight of a serious relationship whereas Ada is deeply in love and unable to sense anything unusual. Despite Alper's mother's warning about never letting Ada go, Alper breaks up with her just when their relationship seemed at its best. Ada is devastated and slaps him in the face before leaving. Alper seems happy for himself and for her after the break-up but then falls into depression and feels remorse. Four years later, Alper is taking his friend's son to the cinema where he meets Ada, now married with a daughter and living in London. Their conversation is polite and they act as if they were over each other, but in their thoughts we learn that Ada secretly visited Alper's mother and found out more about his past; and that Alper sits every day in front of her shop imagining that she still works there. They share one tearful last hug before Alper leaves confused and desolate as they look at each other for the last time. Ada imagines a happy ending, an ending they deserved. The film mainly emphasises the desolation and seclusion of modern life and its consequences on the romantic relationship between Alper and Ada.
 
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It is always interesting to see how a culture is reflected in its films. This is especially true in the more mainstream, popular flicks that fill out the top end of the highest-grossing lists year after year, the cookie-cutter movies that cast their net wide, and don't dabble in precious, art-house posturing. I recently had the opportunity to see such a film from Turkey.
   

Alone (Issiz Adam) was a huge hit in its native country, reaching an audience of almost 3 million. It is, at its heart, a love story described in the promotional poster as 'controversial' and 'poignant'. For its own country, the film reportedly ruffled feathers and provoked tears in equal measure, but it is a somewhat flawed, one-step-forward-two-steps-back achievement when thrust onto the international stage.


Set in the glistening Turkish capital of Istanbul, Alone presents itself as a thoroughly modern urban film. Alper (Cemal Hunal), the male protagonist, is a successful chef, and owner of a high-class restaurant. He spends his days cooking, and nights going to clubs and hiring prostitutes. His passions are food and music, and while perusing a second hand bookshop's collection of LPs, comes across the radiantly beautiful 20-something Ada (Melis Birkan). The film frolicks along for its first hour or so as a mostly predictable, generic romantic comedy, as Alper pursues the initially stubborn, but progressively relenting Ada. He buys her a book, she buys him a record. He cooks for her, she rejects his advances (but, really, she wants it).

It is typical Richard Curtis stuff, full of serendipity, exaggerated supporting characters and longing glances. However, the innocence of this light comedy is submerged in a distinct obsession with the modern and the fashionable. The film is almost fetishistic in its display of iPhones, flashy cars and spacious apartments. Each scene is shot with a lavish decadence, with locations scouted and contexts conspired to present Istanbul as if in a tourism promo.

Indeed, tourism features in a more concrete level of the film, as Alper's mother (Yildiz Kültür) visits from her rural village, and is wowed by the metropolis and its many delights. This accompanies an acute, even jarring shift in the film's tone towards something much more quiet and dramatic. In its second half, Alonebecomes a family drama, full of buried emotions, tense silences and conflicts of values. Here, director-writer Çağan Irmak attempts to bring much depth and thematic weight to the narrative, but the lightness of the film's opening mismanages the darkness in Alper's character (his empty, kinky sex and abusive tendencies are not explored, but rather pushed under the rug). Therefore, his shift from doting lover to distant emotional recluse is ineffective and puzzling. There are scenes with potential, however, especially one eruption of repressed frustration at a meal with his mother, but this seriousness feels messy, ungraceful and heavy-handed.

The film shirks complexity and conflict for easy, sentimental resolution. Alper is painted, through contrived expository dialogue, as a damaged soul - lonely and chronically depressed in his urban life. He rejects the safety of the romantic relationship in favour of 'freedom'. Ada, a victim in this game of shifting sympathies, is reduced to tears and discarded. This would be a suitable conclusion in itself, but Irmak inserts a coda, set years later, where a regretful Alper has thrown himself into life as a surrogate uncle for one of his employee's sons. One day, he has a chance encounter with Ada, now married and living in the UK. This addition effectively locks down the story, and is presented in such an expressive mode that little is left unspoken - even the thoughts of the two former lovers are overlaid as voice-over tracks. It is a tear-jerking conclusion, but it is over-the-top and a little exploitative.

Alone is a schizoid film, part When Harry Met Sally, part Annie Hall. It attempts to be strident in its portrayal of 21st Century life and romance, but ends up being contrived, stagy and a little conservative. Fulfillment and peace are only found in accepted family-based structures. Early in the film, a little girl enters Ada's fancy dress shop, and asks for a cowboy outfit. This interrogation of gender norms, initially intriguing, turns out to be a red herring, as Ada can only move on from Alper into wife- and motherhood. Not that either roles are truly backward, or that urban life is all lovely, but Irmak's Alone feels too much like a mix of popcorn fluff and a half-written manifesto, with all of the sentiment of the former, and lacking the commentary and depth of the latter.