Most of us had that moment when we wished we could simply reboot our lives and start over, far from everyone and everything we knew, moving to a new town or country, changing our profession, meeting new people, and letting go of the old. In reality, second chances are rarely offered; thus, they must be seized, and this is what the main protagonist Reyhan (Defne Kayalar) of Melisa Önel's drama “Suddenly” does.
Suddenly is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam
The story centers around Reyhan who, because of her husband's new job, has returned to Istanbul after living in Hamburg for more than twenty years. She is introduced during a magnetic resonance imaging scan in the opening scene, with her scared eyes looking straight into the camera, surrounded by the terrible whiteness of a medical room. When she afterwards gets presented with different olfactory probes at the nostrils, there is no doubt as to why she is there.
Instead of undergoing more tests, Reyhan decides to ignore them and choses to walk out on her husband to pay a visit to her childhood neighborhood which is seen through her melancholic eyes: in spacious rooms of her parent's house, the greyness of silent streets and the sea that should bring all the smells from her childhood back, but refuses to. A dreamily painted picture of the coastal town district known for its fishing, is the ideal setting for Reyhan's quest. On her long, mentally liberating path, she will meet ghosts from the past and present, and those of the living people swallowed by loneliness and the lack of perspective, and this melancholic mood is bolstered by the original score by the Serbian composer Branislav Jovancevic.
Dialogues nearly feel like breaks in this somber, lovely drama, whose narrative could fool you to think it isn't linear thanks to Özcan Vardar's superb editing. It is a film of unspoken truths and spontaneously revealing mysteries, wonderfully scripted by Melisa Önel and Feride içekolu to show rather than tell how one woman battles her own demons. This is the writers' second fruitful script collaboration after “Seaburners” (2014), also directed by Önel.
The script's concentration is rather on life than illness, which becomes the film's secondary plot. Reyhan begins a spontaneous quest for lost scents as if she truly believes that doing so will cure her of whatever ailment she is suffering from. Before she takes a radical step towards her goal, she makes small experiments. In one scene, she is preparing a meal made of fresh mussels which she first squeezes with all of her might before attempting to smell her palm, but her facial expressions tells that this little effort didn't bring anything.
With her background as a photographer, Melisa Önel is meticulous in composition, and she finds the right support in cinematographer Meryem Yavuz and her lensing. Sometimes she peeks through doors open ajar, strung up bed linen swinging in the wind, almost like spying on what is happening next door. In situations where emotions become more important than the story itself, she is close to her subjects feeling their moods and reading their thoughts.
Defne Kayalar delivers a subtly evolving portrait of a woman who over the course of few days manages to erase her traces and start a new life. Her performance is physical which makes Reyhan's silent, but firm decision to wander off into the unknown so credible. With a role that is built on less dialogues than actions, Kayalar's expressiveness is what makes “Suddenly” a deeply moving film.
Melisa Önel's drama which had its European premiere in Rotterdam's “Harbour” program will certainly travel a long international festival road.
