WHAT A PAIR

PURGATORY (İKİ BAŞLI DEV) , 1990
Turkiye | 35mm,Colour , 97’ | Turkish
Director: Orhan Oğuz
Cast: Cüneyt Arkın, Fikret Kuşkan, Sedef Ecer

MY FATHER AND SON (BABAM VE OĞLUM), 2005
Turkiye | 35mm, Colour, 108’ | Turkish
Director: Çağan Irmak
Cast: Çetin Tekindor, Şerif Sezer, Fikret Kuşkan, Hümeyra

A friend of mine once told me. Can Yücel comes to Ankara for a book signing. When it’s my friend’s turn, the fan in him comes out and he starts babbling on: “I really love your poem ‘I Loved My Father the Most’.” Can Yücel asks him to recite the poem, and then signs the book. This is what he wrote: “I hated my father the most.”
Much beloved, much watched and guaranteed to make you cry, My Father and Son breaks the fragile balance, which fathers and sons build between love/hate and admiration/rivalry, knowing–with childish confidence–that it would be rebuilt, as it lures the audience eager to be captured by either side of this fragile balance, with the clatter of a large family. The film is based on the economy of survival which cannot be smart aleckly dismissed. It is sworn to protect childhood against the premature arrival of adulthood as if scared stiff of losing this warm, magical, beloved thing made of pure emotion. On the other hand, İki Başlı Dev is a film neither much beloved nor much watched. The insular, perfect world of Cengiz and Hakan–father and son–is slowly shaken with the call of adulthood, Hakan’s desire to grow up, and eerie encounters with sexuality and violence. What İki Başlı Dev calmly whispers is valuable. One: in the absence of the father, in the shelter where he thinks he can’t reach him, the son turns into his father. The father has already become an internal monologue. Two: Childhood is not something to cling on to, a precious commodity whose place in the heart should be protected.
Putting these two films side by side, you start hearing Kafka’s voice. The voice which believes that there are more important things than childhood, and is angry at the father who takes up all the space with his grandeur leaving nary a peaceful place to hide. The former is always by the side of the young adult who reverts back to childhood not to cling onto it or stay there but to renounce and bid farewell. Even though it would turn into a rattlebrained shadow. -Umut Tümay Arslan