Film: Men On The Bridge
Release date: 28th January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 87 mins
Director: Asli Özge
Starring: Fikret Portakal, Murat Tokgöz, Umut İlker, Cemile İlker
Genre: Drama
Studio: Verve
Format: Cinema
Country: Germany/Turkey/Netherlands
After winning Best Film awards at the Istanbul and Adana festivals, Men On The Bridge has been granted a limited cinema release in the UK. Asli Özge’s first ‘fiction’ feature loosely interweaves the lives of three Istanbul residents – a taxi-driver, a traffic cop and a young guy illegally selling roses – who every day use the bridge that spans the Bosporus.
Cabbie Umut is struggling to make ends meet and satisfy his young wife, whose ambitions for a bigger apartment are way beyond their income and puts a strain on their marriage. Lonesome cop Murat tries to find a girlfriend on the internet. Teenage Fikret searches for a real job, but is continually thwarted by his lack of education and impoverished background.
Blurring the line between fiction and documentary, Özge’s brisk narrative covers a range of issues - unemployment, immigration, poverty, urbanisation, globalisation, sex, religion, tradition, modernisation – as it depicts the lives of three men from the poorer suburbs of the Turkish capital…
Originally conceived as a documentary, Men On The Bridge often plays out as such through its lack of narrative drive, but resembles a full-blown feature thanks to some impressive camerawork from award-winning cinematographer Emre Erkmen. Technically, it’s a very accomplished picture, especially in its editing - Özge demonstrating an intuitive ability to cut or switch narratives at just the right point before her audience grows bored. For a film in which nothing overly dramatic occurs, it’s quite an achievement that our attention rarely wavers. The lack of conventional storyline may alienate some, though that may be par for the course in a film where alienation is a key theme
Istanbul, and specifically the bridge which crosses the Bosporus, famously stands as the gateway between Europe and Asia. While aspects of this inform her picture, Özge is much more interested in the notoriously congested bridge as a symbol of division. Her film presents not only an Istanbul divided socially and politically, but also a nation – indicated by news reports of fighting in the southeast between the Turkish army and a Kurdish separatist group.
Bridges may also symbolise communication, but in Özge’s film, this symbol is again defined negatively. Just as the film occupies a no-man’s land between documentary and movie, the bridge represents a spatial nowhere. It’s a space marked by journeying without arrival, a kind of sustained stasis for the three men amidst the continual passage of the other travellers. For Umut, Murat and Fikret, the bridge goes nowhere. These are characters in the process of being left behind by the promises, economic or otherwise, of modern Istanbul.
All three men are linked by disenchantment within their jobs, as well as by a shared inability to communicate and connect; symptomatic of their sense of apartness, of something missing from their lives. When 24-year old Murat isn’t displaying his immaturity by punctuating his online chats with childish animations, oblivious to the unimpressed reactions on the other end of the videocam, he’s embarking on some of the most toe-curlingly awkward dates since Robert De Niro took Cybill Shepherd to a porn cinema in Taxi Driver. Fikret’s impoverished background and general ignorance leads to his being sacked on the first day of his new restaurant job - he doesn’t get off to the best start in having no idea what cutlery means. Umut and his wife Cemile struggle to communicate meaningfully with each other, their exchanges often descending into sulking and reproachful silences. When they do manage to get across what they want or expect from life, the other seems unable or unwilling to listen. Fitting, then, that Umut is fined for using his mobile phone while driving across the bridge.
Men On The Bridge has one thing in common with a number of recent Turkish films, and especially with Pelin Esmer’s 10 To 11 - transition and a yearning for the Western way of life. The characters strive for a piece of the life advertised by soap operas and Hollywood films. This aspect is immediately signposted in the opening scene where Umut watches Tim Burton’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, and there is a further link between that movie’s golden ticket and the recurring motif of lottery tickets in Özge’s film. The Western way of life is represented primarily by images of consumerism and capitalism: the Dolce & Gabbana shopping bags carried by the two women Cemile follows down the street; the gaming consoles and mobile phones in the department store where Fikret and his friend spend the afternoon before they are thrown out as suspected shoplifters; Murat’s credit card debts... They represent a lifestyle which lies beyond their reach. Characters frequently say things like, “Everything depends on money,” or “If you have money, you can do anything.” By far the least likeable character, though, is Umut’s boss and landlord, Bülent; who has ‘made it’, and advises Umut to hit his wife if she complains too much. Umut tells Cemile money is this Muslim hadji’s true god. They both criticise Bülent for worshipping money, even as they secretly envy him.
Within a world marked by constant longing and denial, love and commerce become intertwined. Murat must pay membership fees for all those dating websites, searching for a love which he never finds. “I want the same things you want,” Umut tells his wife, but the distance between what each wants and what each expects means day by day they fall further out of love. Fikret has neither love nor money, and endeavours to find a proper job so he can pay a prostitute to relieve him of his virginity. It reveals how little he has come to expect from life that the prospect of finding a girl he doesn’t have to pay for sex seems as remote as escaping his job selling flowers on the bridge.
Though the film never prioritises one story over another, Umut and Cecile’s narrative has the most impact; mainly because in its examination of a marriage in crisis, it seems to suggest love alone may not be enough. It would be easy to brush off Umut’s attitude as simply depression, but the film encourages us to address the social conditions which have shaped his outlook. That pessimism seems more realistic than his wife’s dreams of a huge flat screen television to place on the wall of an apartment neither can afford. In this, the film’s themes carry universal resonance. Özge seems to identify the false promises of capitalism, the dissatisfaction that rampant consumerism (the ‘aspirational lifestyle’) breeds and constantly feeds back off. Özge never takes sides, though, and her film is more concerned with asking questions than providing answers. Umut seems more resigned to his lot than content, and at least Cemile has some life left in her, and still retains the capacity to dream and hope for better.
The film is performed by non-professional actors, essentially playing themselves (with the exception of Murat, who as a policeman was not allowed to appear in the film). It’s the most obvious example of the film’s blurring between documentary and movie, and it adds an extra authenticity to proceedings. You wonder how close to the bone much of this is for the real people, and to what extent their actual lives resemble those onscreen. A final exchange between Umut and Cemile is especially powerful. Both are clearly descending into a state of depression (if not already there), and the pain is tangible upon their faces and in their body language. This is more than acting, and it can be almost unbearably intimate in places.
The film closes with its only moment of genuine connection. Murat, the archetypal country boy lost in the big city, sits by the shoreline and calls his mother to say he misses her and his little village. Significantly, he does not cross the river via the bridge, instead he takes the ferry. A conclusion which seems to confirm Özge’s position that the modern world may be no place for those with a heart.
It’s debatable whether the world really needs another piece of social realism portraying modern alienation, but it would be a shame if Men On The Bridge slips under the radar. It could do with a little more light to balance out the pessimism, which sometimes threatens to overwhelm, but, for the most part, Özge’s film is an assured, thought-provoking debut. It will be interesting to see where she goes from here. GJK
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