Steam: The Turkish Bath

One of film's underappreciated virtues is its ability to evoke the immanence of places and things -- something that Ferzan Ozpetek's Steam:The Turkish Bath does with exquisite poignance. The misty light over the Bosporus, the texture of a damp wall, the pathos of a dead woman's dusty relics all provide this seductive fable of the exhiliration of change and the ineluctability of fate with the jolt of a vaguely recalled epiphany.

Hot-shot Rome designer Francesco (Italiam film legend Vittorio Gassman's son Alessandro, resembling a sensitive Ben Affleck) chafes at having to leave his tight schedule and prickly relationship with wife and partner Marta (dark and lanky Francesca d'Aloja) to travel to Istanbul to sell a property willed to him by his estranged Aunt Anita. Once there, he's intrigued to find his inheritance is a derelict steam bath, or haman, and is further drawn in by the family overseeing it -- including the nubile Füsun (Basak Koklukaya) and, especially, her boyish brother Mehmet (Mehmet Gunsur).

As Francesco restores the bath and reads his aunt's letters about how the city and the haman transformed her life, his own life alters with strange desires and a stranger's memories. In the background lies the threat of a basilisk-eyed entrepreneur who wants to raze the place to build a soulless development, and the caressing vapors of this tantalizing new world slowly form into a climax of Borgesian irony. Startling in its originality and imaginativeness, Steam is an unexpected treasure. At the Avon Friday and Saturday at midnight.
-- Peter Keough