Belonging (Burak Cevik, 2019) (Patreon)

This jarringly experimental narrative film from a relative newcomer (this is only his second feature) marks Burak Cevik as someone to watch. Although, in the end, his reach exceeds his grasp, I've never been one to fault an artist for ambition, especially at this stage in their career. Essentially a layered meta-narrative about a dastardly deed committed (indirectly) by Cevik's aunt when she was 21 years old, Belonging functions quite literally as a police procedural, drawing much of its source material from the statement made by his aunt's accomplice, a man she met one night by chance. As Cevik explains in the film's brief prologue, this true-crime story has been a key part of his family's life for as long as he can remember, and so he feels a sort of joint-ownership of it, and is making the film in part to try to understand this action that he had no part of but has nevertheless been foundational to his being.

The first part of the film consists of voiceover narration by "Onur," the man who went to prison for the crime. As he dispassionately reads from the police report, detailing step by step how he met Pelin, Cevik's aunt, and eventually got pulled into the murder that she wanted him to commit for her, Belonging shows us fixed-frame shots of stand-in locations for the various key spots in the crime report, devoid of people, as if we are thumbing through photographs in the police file. Mike D'Angelo (who is a somewhat bigger fan of Belonging than I am) has compared this first half of the film to James Benning, which is fairly accurate, although Benning would never employ the color palette -- searing, neon reds and icy blues -- that Cevik uses here.

Then, in the second half of the film, two actors portray Onur (Çaglar Yalçinkaya) and Pelin (Eylül Su Sapan) and act out, as if in a one-act play, the initial meeting and one-night stand between the two individuals. Although this is only the first moment in what we know will be a fateful, doomed relationship, there is no indication of this in how the two actors and Cevik portray the interaction. It is characterized by its normality, the coming together of two lonely people who, as cliche would have it, could be any two lonely people anywhere in the world.

This doesn't exactly work. Cevik seems to work a little too hard to emphasize the banality of this scene, and in so doing makes it uncanny and strange. Also, he continues to employ his fixed-frame technique in this sequence, where a significant change in style might have served him better. Given its placement within the overall scheme of the film, this dramatic portion may be intended to be strange, a kind of stilted reenactment of what we now know to be the germination of a criminal enterprise. And considering the fact that Cevik ends with an epilogue that returns to the police-report voiceover, continuity, not disruption, may be what he's after.

But I think that Belonging would be a stronger film if, given what we (and the characters) aren't supposed to know yet, Cevik marked a more radical break from his aesthetic dominant. This would have lent additional poignancy and gravitas to the sequence and, by extension, the film as a whole. But considering the overall framework of the film, which I do admire, I may come around in time to thinking this objection is more of a quibble. In any case, there's no way I'm missing Cevik's next film.