Berlinale Competition: Anyone who has jazz would not want phrases | EUROtoday

In the cinema, movie characters are portrayed by actors. In İlker Çatak’s movie “Yellow Letters”, nevertheless, Ankara is performed by Berlin and Istanbul by Hamburg. You discover out about this at the start in overlays, however you’d have acknowledged it that means: the TV tower, Alexanderplatz, the Elbphilharmonie, the Landungsbrücken. Two cities to switch two others the place Çatak could not movie.

This role-playing sport works surprisingly effectively. The alienation would not appear disruptive, quite the opposite: it makes the story the movie tells much more worldly. It’s a few married couple, Derya and Aziz, who get into bother with an unnamed regime, behind which you’ll be able to simply acknowledge the Erdoğan authorities. The two are mentioned to have insulted the president in emails and social media posts and supported the protest motion towards him. Aziz, a playwright, loses his professorship on the college, Derya, the star of the National Theater, is fired. The two transfer from Ankara to Istanbul, the place Aziz makes a dwelling as a taxi driver and Derya has to decide on between showing in his new four-person play “Yellow Letters” and the well-paid main function in a tv collection. Then there may be her daughter Ezgi, who goes her personal means within the massive metropolis on the Bosporus and thus triggers the precise drama of the movie.

As at all times, when two individuals get right into a disaster, their greatest and worst sides come to the fore in equal measure: Aziz’s patriarchal conduct, but in addition his indomitability, Derya’s want for recognition, but in addition her means to maintain a cool head in instances of want. Çatak’s manufacturing would not take the 2 of them out of sight for a second and on the identical time maintains an summary of what’s not a self-evident artwork, particularly on the Berlinale, the place the well-intentioned typically replaces the well-done. But his movie has one other high quality that goes past craftsmanship: that of empathy.

He not solely reveals what his most important characters expertise, he attracts us into their lives, he lets us really feel their concern of not with the ability to deal with the grip of energy and their defiance when the core of their existence is at risk, their artwork, their independence, their love for his or her youngster. The director is helped by his nice actors, particularly Özgü Namal as Derya, but in addition his concept of ​​filming this Turkish story in Germany. Because in “Yellow Letters” you retain asking your self whether or not all of this might occur on this nation, and if you learn the yr 1933 in enormous numbers on a wall in entrance of a courthouse, you do not forget that it occurred a very long time in the past. The movie has each ft within the current, nevertheless it extends a feeler into the previous, wherein its plot is mirrored – identical to Ankara in Berlin and Hamburg in Istanbul.

While “Yellow Letters” focuses on the artist couple and their daughter, Grant Gee’s movie “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” reveals a depressive household constellation of the prolonged type: the eponymous jazz musician, who’s destroyed by his heroin habit; his spouse Elaine, who can be an addict and would not know what to do with herself; his brother Harry, who envies Bill’s expertise and has schizophrenic episodes; and the brothers’ dad and mom, who’re continuously getting on one another’s nerves within the excessive warmth of their retirement dwelling in Florida. That appears like 100 minutes of cinema that you simply completely should keep away from, however “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” isn’t that bleak.

There are comical moments, when father and mom argue whereas the son shakes in chilly turkey within the subsequent mattress, and moments of actual tragedy, when Bill and Harry circle one another with phrases that present simply sufficient brightness to point the abyss between them. Seen on this means, the movie has the whole lot it must be the thousand and first American household drama since Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People”. But he suffers from an sickness that forestalls him from telling tales. And this illness is known as artwork.

Bill Evans was no unusual pianist, however a legend of jazz music, and the Englishman Gee is striving doggedly to succeed in the identical aesthetic heights as this genius. That’s why he immerses his movie within the most interesting black and white, builds backdrops of completely tidy dreariness and illustrates his hero’s drug intoxication with avant-garde visible excesses {that a} Buñuel or Dalí needn’t have been ashamed of. It simply would not assist: the story would not get wherever, it hangs one stand-up dialogue after one other, and Grant Gee’s wild Sixties appear like a museum exhibit preserved in formalin. Unfortunately, “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” solely has the title of Bill Evans, not the jazz.

So the Berlinale makes its typical calculation within the first competitors entries: right here the factitious, there the artfully heavy and good. We’ll see which sort of sport has the higher hand within the subsequent ten days. The actually nice cinema lies past each. Maybe this competition will occur too.