The 5th Boston Turkish Film and Music Festival

Last night K, Joe and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see Istanbul Tales (Anlat Istanbul, 2005), which opened The 5th Boston Turkish Film and Music Festival. I likened the film to a Turkish Pulp Fiction, in which the world of organized crime and mob violence were prominent themes and in which seemingly disconnected stories were woven together. In telling the different stories, Anlat Istanbul, which was set amidst the backdrop of Istanbul, combines uniquely Turkish elements with elements and a narrative structure that were borrowed, at least in part, from well-known children’s fairytales. The film is not a retelling of these stories. Rather, each of the film’s five stories is a dark and shadowy reflection of the original tale it mirrors.

The film’s Snow White is the daughter of a mob kingpin who is gunned down by a close associate working at the behest of the mobster’s ruthless and conniving second wife, who then sets out to eliminate her step-daughter because she knows too much. In the story of an abused M to F transsexual prostitute who falls in love with a local shopkeeper, we see elements of the Cinderella story, including an aging and effeminate former drag queen as the fairy godmother. A Kurd from eastern Turkey looking for work in Istanbul stumbles upon a Sleeping Beauty in the form of the sister in a sibling pair who constitute the sole survivors of a once great Istanbul dynasty. Living alone in an aging mansion on the Bosphorus, the young and attractive woman, who we are led to believe is a schizophrenic, believes that the Kurd, who has broken into her home in search of food, is the ghost of her great-grandfather. In what is perhaps the most poignant of the five stories, a young woman is released from prison where she spent several years for smuggling after taking the fall for her gangster husband, who was using her as a mule. Once free, she nearly falls prey to a member of her husband’s thugs who offers to protect her, but is really out to insure that she doesn’t squeal. In the end, this Little Red Riding Hood leaves Istanbul behind and boards a plane for Germany, where she will join her parents.

The film begins and ends with the Pied Piper: a clarinet player who, after catching his young wife in bed with the handsome owner of a nearby photography store, takes to the streets with his clarinet and leads a group of misfits—all characters from the other stories—to a bridge crossing Istanbul’s Golden Horn (Halıç). In the closing sequence, the bridge itself is still under construction and, as a result, ends abruptly, its open end projecting outward over the body of water separating the two sides of Istanbul’s European shore. In this way, the bridge perhaps is meant to serve as a metaphor for life, which, for some of these characters at least, is a bridge that goes nowhere.