Sundance Saturday, January 28

Today I finally saw Can, the first Turkish movie to play at the festival.

Set in Istanbul, Ayse and Cemal are married but unable to conceive. Since they are uneducated and live in the slums, they don't know about adoption. So the way they decide to have a child is to buy one through the black market. Soon after getting the kid, Cemal freaks out and leaves his wife and their new child.

Cut to several years later. Ayse is raising the child (named Can) alone. She leaves for work every day and takes him with her. She leaves him in the park and tells him to wait for her. She works her shift then comes back to pick Can up. This is their daily routine.

We revisit Cemal after he has remarried, and his new wife is pregnant.

Without giving away the ending, this is basically the plot of the movie. But the movie does not unfold in a linear fashion. The movie keeps jumping back and forth in time, and while that makes the story a little more interesting, it also makes it much more confusing. It was a ways into the movie before I understood that we were seeing Ayse in two different time periods. I think the filmmakers could have done a better job of not making it so confusing.

Also, things could have been explained better. I didn't know until during the Q&A that they were poor and lived in a slum. Since I don't know what life in Istanbul is like, I had no idea whether they were well off or not. I didn't know that it is common for people like them to have no knowledge of adoption, because during the movie I kept wondering why they didn't try adoption.

The boy who plays Can is adorable. I felt so bad for him, because all he does every day is sit on the park bench, waiting for his mom. When they walk to the park, he looks over and sees other kids playing on the playground. He longs to play like a regular kid, but his mom doesn't have time to wait for him to go play. He also longs for his mother to show him some love, but she seems to have no emotional attachment to him. She treats him like a burden.

Late in the movie, she seems to warm up to him. I didn't really understand what made her attitude change. The entire movie, she seems to have no love for her son. Suddenly at the end she seems like a good mother. I think that is too much of an abrubt character arc with no explanation.

Last, the subtitles. I have never seen such bad subtitles. They are in broken english, and sometimes they ahve typos (like that one). They really need to let someone go through those subtitles and clean them up.