IN NOWHERELAND (Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, 2001)

In Turkey, [m]ore than a thousand people go missing “normally” every year and only half can be found. Some of these people go missing while in [police] custody.

Dedicated to his mother and to all mothers, writer-director Tayfun Pirselimoğlu’s fictional Hiçbiryerde follows a mother’s search for her missing son. When she is asked whether her son was involved in politics, Sükran answers, “Certainly not.” After losing her husband, a political prisoner, Sükran had determined to keep hold of her son, Veysel; but the boy, after all, was also his father’s son.
     Indeed, Veysel and factory co-worker and close friend Halil are both missing, but Halil’s father has no interest in placing himself at risk to press authorities about his son’s absence. The truth is, Veysel is likely already dead. The film opens with Sükran’s fainting at the sight of the corpse, with its face smashed in, that authorities had asked if she could identify. Sükran insists this is not her son, but perhaps only in a state of denial aimed at keeping hope alive. Veysel’s girlfriend has identified the body as her boyfriend’s on the basis of familiarity with his body. The dead boy even had the same birthmark on his groin. “My son had no such birthmark!” Sükran explodes, but she may be contesting his having passed from her own primary influence to this girl’s. Indeed, she charges the girlfriend with having “filled [Veysel’s] head” with all the “nonsense” that may have gotten him into trouble.
     When she hears that a prisoner with her son’s exact name, Veysel Aksu, escaped from a police transport and has been seen in Mardin, she leaves Istanbul by train for Mardin, takes a hotel room, and does her best to track down her son. Eventually, a clandestine meeting is arranged between her and Veysel, but this Veysel Aksu, expecting to be reunited with his mother, turns out to be some other mother’s son. This contributes to Pirselimoğlu’s theme that responsibility for all children falls on all of us. When later asked whether the corpse of this other Veysel Aksu is her son, this time Sükran says yes. She has become the dead boy’s Mother of Loss, and her identification of his remains mirror-images and symbolically reverses her earlier refusal to identify the earlier set of remains as her son’s.
     Prior to a stunning documentary coda, Pirselimoğlu provides Sükran with a sudsy, unconvincing speech that Veysel must find her, rather than the other way around—the low point of a very fine film whose dead-ended “feel” seems carefully attuned to that of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). The film is intriguingly underlit to suggest the layers of mystery, some woven by Sükran herself, surrounding Sükran—police/political mystery, psychological mystery, a speck or two of metaphysical mystery. Regrettably, Pirselimoğlu does not always handle Sükran’s periodic imaginings or hallucinations ably—and when he fails at this, the result is confusing and somewhat irritating.
     Zuhal Olcay (best actress, Istanbul) gives an okay performance as Sükran. It is certainly not in the league of Jack Lemmon’s in Constantin Costa-Gavros’s Missing (1982).
     For this film Pirselimoğlu won the Special Grand Prize of the Jury at Montréal.

(JADE) GODDESS OF MERCY (Ann Hui, 2003)

Framed by gracious occasions of Buddhist observance, Hong Kong’s Ann Hui’s Yu guanyin, from her birth country, China, is a fierce, stunning, viscerally thrilling film noir, in rich, vibrant color, about a young police woman, An Xin (Zhao Wei, superb—best actress, Golden Phoenix Award), who identifies, and is identified by others, with the Goddess of Mercy, whose amulet she wears. The film, based on a novel by Hai Yan, who co-authored the script along with Ho Ivy, involves three romantic entanglements in An Xin’s life, and these in turn cross her work as part of a drug enforcement team. Another element deepens the tangle: love for and loyalty to family, even to the point of fatal revenge. An infant is involved; one of the three men is his father, but all three are his custodians at different points. Ultimately, only one of the five—An Xin, her baby, the three men—is left alive, and he is headed one way, while Buddhist pilgrims, chanting, are headed in the opposite direction, from whence he has just come: a haunting finish—and an ironical one, as religious faith is shown in alternative co-existing forms: more hope than faith, committed faith; all-consuming faith, faith as an integral part of a complicated, challenging life.
     An Xin writes one of the men a detailed letter explaining her extraordinary past involving the others, and this helps account for the film’s brilliant structure, where a long flashback—the past, tradition—seeks to absorb the present that contains it. The letter proves part of An Xin’s redemption, although her bravely independent showdown with the Mao brothers, one of whom once loved her but who, now mistrusting her, has joined his brother in trying to kill her, accounts for the rest.