Turkey distraught Asia in a minor key at the Museum of Fine Arts BY PETER KEOUGH
	"The Third Boston Turkish Film Festival" At the Museum of Fine Arts April 22 through May 2.

Turkey, so goes the bromide, is where East meets West, Asia abuts Europe, and an Oriental philosophy of resignation to fate contends with an Occidental faith in progress. That can make for a melancholy mix. The country reflected in the features screening in the Museum of Fine Arts’ "Third Boston Turkish Film Festival" (10 in all, five available for preview) doesn’t look very happy or hopeful or sure of itself. The films themselves, however, demonstrate a cinema that is vital, confident, and brimming with invention.

It’s not above borrowing from past masters, either. Reha Erdem’s A Run for Money (2000; May 2 at 2:20 p.m.) draws on Hitchcockian themes and perversity (though not his suspense) in its tale of Selim (Taner Birsel, who looks unnervingly like Jerry Orbach on Law and Order), the honest, charmless proprietor of an Istanbul men’s shop whose life takes a turn when he finds $426,000 in US currency in the back seat of a cab. Legendary, if not mocked, for his scrupulous, old-fashioned honesty, not to mention his parsimony, Selim resists the lure of the ill-gotten loot (embezzled by a bank clerk, according to the newspapers) for a while. He can’t bring himself to return it, though, piling it instead into a safety-deposit box. He does take out one C-note, which he sweatily exchanges for lira (26 million is the going rate). Soon he’s stuffing bundles into his pockets and splurging, to the delight and dismay of his wife and the rapid deterioration of his character.

Reminiscent of Robert Bresson’s L’argent in tone, misanthropy, and crisply tailored editing, Money does not so much reiterate the old saw about money and evil as it examines the pathology of contemporary materialism. Everyone in the film spends his or her time talking about money — getting, spending, stealing, and losing it. Selim is the only who seems to value it rather than covet it, in the traditional sense of making creative use of money rather than just consuming it. His downfall is macabre and comic and bodes ill for the future.

Money and tradition conflict also in Semih Kaplanoglu’s Away from Home (2001; May 1 at 3:15 p.m.), which had it not been for an overbearing voiceover might have been a minor masterpiece. Selim (Tolga Cevik) has his mind made up: he’s going to leave everything behind and move to his dream city, New York. He breaks up with his girlfriend, and to pay for his move, he plans to sell his father’s old country house and olive grove to developers who are eager to build apartment blocks there. But as if summoned by this threatened breach with the past, his ancient Uncle Nasuhi (Erol Keskin) returns from Russia after an exile of 58 years. A Communist, Nasuhi fled Turkey for the Soviet Union just in time for the Nazi invasion. Arrested as a spy by Stalin’s police, he spent years in a labor camp, an experience that seems to have left him flinty, spry, subversively wise, and determined to replant his roots in the old family estate. On the way, he has rescued and adopted Olga (Anna Bielska), a stray Russian waif in search of the sea-captain father who deserted her.

It sounds like a premise that could rapidly decline into a sentimental comedy of clichés with a neatly resolved conflict (Selim gets Olga; Nasuhi gets the farm). Kaplanoglu, however, aspires more to poetry than to sit-com, and Keskin’s performance is tart and leathery. The film’s dénouement attains the kind of eloquence reminiscent of the best efforts of Theo Angelopoulos as Nasuhi intones to a sleeping Selim: "When you look back over your life, this will be the only place you’ll remember."

Home offers a look at those who used to tend the olive groves, an older generation attached to the earth, the seasons, and the past, now seemingly set for extinction. What about the new generation of apartment-block dwellers who’ve replaced them? Zeki Demirkubuz’s first film, Block C (1994; April 24 at 12:15 p.m., with the director hosting a discussion afterward), examines these lives of unquiet desperation, in particular that of Tülay (Serap Aksoy), the rich, disaffected wife of Selim (Selçuk Yöntem), whose main occupation seems to be smoking cigarettes and watching TV. Hell hath no fury like a woman bored, and Tülay is looking for trouble. She drives to the end of a deserted jetty and waits until the inevitable ruffians show up to harass her. She wanders through a park where, à la Blow-Up, she witnesses a crime (or does she?). But her curiosity is really piqued when she surprises her maid going at it with the janitor’s son, Halet (Fikret Kuskan). Mirroring her fragmented, dissociated behavior is Demirkubuz’s narrative structure and style. Much of the story unfolds in jagged flashbacks as Tülay relates it to a friend. Is it all a fantasy? Unlike the Selim of Away from Home, she hasn’t even one definite memory to cling to.

So is this Turkey’s future: sullen, bearded guys named Selim with crumbling relationships who watch TV and smoke too much? In fact, the hero of Demirkubuz’s newest film, The Waiting Room (2003; April 23 at 7:30 p.m. and May 1 at 1:15 p.m., with the director present at both screenings), is not Selim but Ahmet, and he’s played by the director himself. Ahmet is a kind of male counterpart to Tülay, except that he’s a film director. He’s widely esteemed but nonetheless feels worthless and is struggling to wrap up his adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Torpor overwhelms him at the prospect of work; indifference paralyzes him when it comes to his girlfriend. He invents one infidelity to get rid of her and another to lure in his adoring assistant, until she bores him too. He’s stirred briefly when he toys with the notion of casting a burglar he’s caught breaking into his place as Raskolnikov. But mostly he just watches TV and smokes.

Unlike most films about boredom, The Waiting Room is not boring itself but harrowing, and full of pathos and trenchant details. Ahmet had taken in a pregnant stray cat that flees when she gives birth; in vain he tries to get "the whore" to return to her litter. The third in the director’s "Tales of Darkness" trilogy, it leaves you both regretful and thankful there won’t be a fourth.

But Demirkubuz, who’s had considerable exposure in film festivals (the first two "Tales of Darkness" both appeared in the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival), is not the only Turkish director to have established himself as an auteur, or even the only one with a trilogy of sorts. Winner of Cannes’s Grand Jury Prize last year, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s third film, Distant (2003; April 22 at 7:30 p.m., April 24 at 3:40 p.m.; April 29 at 3:45 p.m., May 1 at 11 a.m., and May 2 at 10:30 a.m.), pursues the same themes as his previous two — the gulf between one’s origins and one’s fate, between the deprivation of the old ways and the alienation of the new — but without the Kiarostami-like self-reflexivity of those works. Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir, who played a filmmaker in Ceylan’s second film, Clouds of May) is a wanna-be Tarkovsky (he watches Solaris on his VCR but switches to porn) who has fled his rustic roots to make his dreams come true in Istanbul, his version of New York. At age 40, however, he’s resigned himself to a comfortable career photographing ceramic tiles. His estranged wife is about to repatriate in Canada with her new husband, and his only constant companion is a mouse that he tries without success to eradicate. And that, except for smoking and watching TV, is pretty much Mahmut’s life until a cousin from the old village turns up. Laid off by the local factory, Yusuf (played by Ceylan’s real-life cousin, the late Mehmet Emin Toprak, co-winner with Özdemir of the Cannes 2003 Best Actor Award) hopes to crash at Mahmut’s place until he gets a job on a ship, or whatever. A subtle, slower, and much darker Odd Couple, Distant lives up to its title, glimpsing a void of alienation that transcends nation and history and engulfs East and West, past and future alike.