Awarded short film director(though I haven't had a chance to see any short flick by him)Dersu Yavuz Altun's debut feature film Murky Waters is apparently designed to be a modern day film-noir, a genre which has not been treated duly in the recent history of Turkish cinema. Inspired from three different "page three news"(in Turkey the newspapers don't run female nude models in the third page. This page is covered by frequent acts of crime and depravity)Murky Waters tells the story of a weird set of murders and rapes in a little town on the lake shore. The movie starts with the arrival of an inspector and two authorized personnel into the town.Apparently they are supposed to enlighten a murder case but the real agenda behind the whole case is to turn it into an isolated case just because it leads to clandestine governmental issues. The whole story is narrated in police custody by the wife of one of the murdered victims. What she tells through flashbacks slowly reveals the connections between the bodies.The woman who is interrogated,Aylin (Idil Firat) is a teacher who has been reassigned to this town from Istanbul recently. The movie does not really tell exactly why she has been posted to the little town but it's assumed that she wants to turn over a new leaf with her husband who has been indulging in an on again off again alcoholism. On her first day in the town, while she is driving to the state housing she will stay, she gets distracted by a telephone lineman up on the pole and she swerves off the road and the tire of her Volkswagen bursts. The lineman, Bekir (Ali Erkazan) runs to help her.Sooner than later, we realize Bekir is not particularly the good Samaritan. He turns out to be a temporary switchboard operator who wiretaps telephone conversations for some pezzo de novanta who call themselves "the company" but it's not just that. With his morbid sense of life,Bekir regards himself as someone chosen to drive the devil out of women so he also tapes the conversations of helpless women with a shameful secret to hide.Later on, he uses the cassettes to take advantage of these women.
Dersu Yavuz Altun's story and the characters he has created may have been taken from the very social reality that the unscrupulous modern world bogged itself down but the characters seem,maybe,too real. There is not really a character arc and the plot does not really offer a dynamic journey at some point you could warm up to. I know that a film-noir is supposed to feature cynical,malevolent characters through evil,moral problems but I'm not really sure that the characters build up the electrifying,sleazy atmosphere requisite for the genre. Like the detective in the movie says the movie,at some point,sounds like a novel which wears out the reader with redundant symbols. To narrate a whole story of murder and rapes through the eyes of a woman whose statement may be highly questionable, to dedicate the whole story to some interrogation scene without even a pseudo-controversial sleuthing preliminary should be against the nature of a film-noir. Moreover, the tension that Altun is trying to create with the meager portion of soundtrack along with the wooden acting and non-realistic sex scenes and implausible events (for instance you can't document a homicide by taking pictures of it from a considerable distance-not with a compact machine.You need at least a semi-professional DSLR for that)preclude this movie from turning out to be a fine showpiece of a neatly done film-noir.
Dersu Yavuz Altun's story and the characters he has created may have been taken from the very social reality that the unscrupulous modern world bogged itself down but the characters seem,maybe,too real. There is not really a character arc and the plot does not really offer a dynamic journey at some point you could warm up to. I know that a film-noir is supposed to feature cynical,malevolent characters through evil,moral problems but I'm not really sure that the characters build up the electrifying,sleazy atmosphere requisite for the genre. Like the detective in the movie says the movie,at some point,sounds like a novel which wears out the reader with redundant symbols. To narrate a whole story of murder and rapes through the eyes of a woman whose statement may be highly questionable, to dedicate the whole story to some interrogation scene without even a pseudo-controversial sleuthing preliminary should be against the nature of a film-noir. Moreover, the tension that Altun is trying to create with the meager portion of soundtrack along with the wooden acting and non-realistic sex scenes and implausible events (for instance you can't document a homicide by taking pictures of it from a considerable distance-not with a compact machine.You need at least a semi-professional DSLR for that)preclude this movie from turning out to be a fine showpiece of a neatly done film-noir.
