SUNDANCE: The lower echelons of the Sundance awards, handed out this past Saturday in Park City, are famously inscrutable. Even after watching Can, the Turkish entry in the World Dramatic Competition, I have no idea what might have clinched it as the winner of a Special Jury Prize for Artistic Vision. All of the visions it evoked for me involved my bed—so close and yet so far on my last night of Sundance screenings.
Even when you are not overtired and itching for home, the first image of a movie can function like the first line of a novel you pick up in the bookstore—either it draws you in or it spits you out. The first image of Can, the second feature from writer/director Rasit Á‡elikezer, feels promising: A woman lying prone playfully drums her heels onto the wall above her bed while her husband watches from a chair. They both laugh at some private joke, at first awkwardly and then a little hysterically. That scene forms a high point in the relations of Ayse (Selen Uçer) and Cemal (Serdar Orcin), a couple whose wish to have a baby brings out the darkest parts of them.
When it is determined that Cemal is impotent he begs Ayse to fake a pregnancy, proposing they buy a child on the black market and raise it as their own. Though it’s quite unclear at first—due to a combination of poor editing and even poorer subtitle translation—the miserable mother and son depicted in a series of flash forwards are in fact Ayse and this child, whom they name Can (Yusuf Berkan Demirbag), seven years later. It’s difficult to understand why any mother would treat her son the way Ayse treats Can—she walks him to a busy pier each morning and leaves him there while she works all day, then resentfully drags him home each night—and though the flashbacks fill in the story, they don’t fully account for her contempt.
Having gone along with Cemal’s desperation to save face, Ayse is disconnected from Can from the start, and seems to enter a period of post-partum depression despite not having actually given birth. Cemal eventually abandons Ayse with Can, starting a new and seemingly successful life for himself in a distant city. Ayse is spurned by the few people she knows for reasons we don’t understand, and keeps Can a secret from the staff of the restaurant where she works. She also refuses to enroll Can in school or let him play with other children, which seems particularly cruel. One of the few things that rings true in their interactions is the sort of bedbug disposition the largely silent Can has developed to get by: he can survive on a drop of Ayse’s love for weeks at a time.
Can only gets more confusing as it goes along—the story fits together well enough (although the chronology gets hopelessly tangled once Cemal reappears with a vapid new wife and a mysteriously conceived daughter), but we are deprived of a meaningful understanding of why Ayse in particular behaves the way she does. Striking on location cinematography evokes a vivid sense of place, but despite intimations of a specific cultural milieu and the lonely inner world of a displaced child, Can can’t make us feel where its characters are coming from.
