As other reviewers have remarked, not a lot happens in this film - a police officer Cibrail (Sinan Hancılı) tries to come to terms with his sexuality once Marco (Engin Sert) visits the apartment that Cibrail shares with Christine (Martina Hesse). Nonetheless Tor Iben's seventy-minute drama is far subtler in structure than might be first assumed. Set in the less recognizable areas of Berlin - apart from the Tiergarten and Alexanderplatz - the film explores the psychology of the outsider. As a Turkish tourist resident in Rome, Marco tries to come to terms with Berlin by cruising in bars, looking for any available pick-ups. They provide him with momentary satisfaction, but do not help him to overcome loneliness. Iben's film is full of shots of him trudging the Berlin streets by day and by night, as if looking for something (or someone) but failing to find it. Cibrail seems to have an ordered life with Christine, but finds a particular lack of satisfaction with her; the one sex scene we see involving the two of them is particularly mechanical in tone. It is only when he espies two men making love in a park that his true sexuality comes to the surface. From then on, he makes desperate efforts to lose his outsider status by finding love, even if it means a furtive nighttime grope with Marco while Christine sleeps in the next room. In the end it seems that Cibrail is doomed to a life of perpetual isolation as Marco leaves for Rome and Christine moves out; but the film has an unexpectedly happy, if admittedly transient ending.
Iben's cinematic style is quaintly old-fashioned; there are several zooms in to the characters' faces (and torsos) that are reminiscent of Turkish Yeşilçam films of the Sixties and Seventies. In thematic terms, however, this technique works admirably, as it focuses our attention on the protagonists' expressions as they try to come to terms with their fundamental loneliness. Perhaps it is not only the protagonists that experience this feeling; from the loving close-ups of Hancılı's naked torso at the beginning to the slow tracking shots up and down the lovers' bodies at the end, there is a clear sense that the director longs to participate (even if only vicariously through the camera) in the male experience of love.
A slow, absorbing film that not only shows one man's process of self-discovery, but simultaneously embodies the director's own frustrations as he seems unable to be involved in that process. He can only photograph it.
Iben's cinematic style is quaintly old-fashioned; there are several zooms in to the characters' faces (and torsos) that are reminiscent of Turkish Yeşilçam films of the Sixties and Seventies. In thematic terms, however, this technique works admirably, as it focuses our attention on the protagonists' expressions as they try to come to terms with their fundamental loneliness. Perhaps it is not only the protagonists that experience this feeling; from the loving close-ups of Hancılı's naked torso at the beginning to the slow tracking shots up and down the lovers' bodies at the end, there is a clear sense that the director longs to participate (even if only vicariously through the camera) in the male experience of love.
A slow, absorbing film that not only shows one man's process of self-discovery, but simultaneously embodies the director's own frustrations as he seems unable to be involved in that process. He can only photograph it.