‘The Gulf’: An Elegant Allegory For A Generation Drifting Toward Apocalypse [Crossing Europe Review]

In the most iconic scene from William Wyler‘s “Roman Holiday,” Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn dare each other to slip a hand into La Bocca della Verità. In the opening of Turkish director Emre Yeksan‘s intriguing, enigmatic, gently absurdist “The Gulf,” Selim (the distractingly handsome Ulas Tuna Astepe) does the same, with a few notable differences. His companion in truth-seeking is not a gamine incognito princess, but a frail old lady in a wheelchair. And the “Mouth of Truth” is not an ancient stone feature in Rome but a tacky replica in a Turkish motorway service station that spits out a printed “fortune” in return for a few coins. What Selim’s scrap of paper tells him about the future we never find out, but the way “The Gulf” unfolds, it might as well have been blank.

Selim is on his way back from Istanbul and a messy divorce, to crash with his parents in Izmir. Initially, his genial but slightly dissociated air can be put down to the trauma of a recently failed marriage, and he goes through the motions of homecoming graciously, but with a sleepy-eyed depressiveness. His well-to-do family is quick to embrace him, he visits old friends, sleeps with an old flame and sets up a little bolthole amid his packed boxes in the basement of his parent’s home. But little splinters of surreality start to work themselves into the fabric of his undifferentiated days. A turtle starts to crop up in places a turtle should not be; he bumps into Cihan (Ahmet Melih Yilmazan) whom he does not remember but who claims to be a military service acquaintance; and watching the blaze from an oil tanker that has caught fire in the bay, his mother experiences a prolonged bout of deja vu.

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These flourishes make for some striking tableaux. Selim gets a temp job as an overseer in a lumber yard, but our introduction to the place is a Tati-esque scene of burly men tenderly tapping at newly felled logs and then checking intently for termites, pressing their ears flat to the raw wood like awestruck fathers-to-be listening to their lovers’ bellies. Later, as the city becomes progressively more deserted, streets are suddenly rendered dead ends by abandoned cars, that gangs of near-feral kids take orgiastic pleasure in destroying. And Selim’s mother goes about her regular housework wearing a full-sized industrial gasmask, to combat the foul smell that suddenly pervades the air. “Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” Selim asks her, but he seems to be the only one unaffected by the stench.

Or not really: Cihan, to whose insistent friendship Selim submits despite not really trusting the man’s motives, also seems able to cope with the miasma. Perhaps that’s because up where he lives, in a shanty town made of beer crates and plastic sheeting, high above the stifling fug of the city, everyone seems able to breathe a little easier. It’s one of the many ironic absurdities that Yeksan and co-writer Ahmet Büke’s intelligent, allusive script deals in, that the well-heeled Selim should scrabble around in a dingy basement, while a self-described “lowlife” like Cihan should occupy the literal higher ground.

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But then, social class is the other overarching theme in “The Gulf.” On several occasions Yeksan deliberately, artificially draws our attention to a working-class character – a housekeeper, a waiter, a flatbed truck full of day laborers — who would otherwise be peripheral, following them into their own spaces and lingering on them while the soundtrack continues to play the family’s chatter. Indeed, as the city is denuded of its more affluent citizens, who all decamp elsewhere to avoid the stench, it is as though it is reclaimed by the less well-off — amid the creeping paranoia there is the faintest sense of redress, like a kind of class justice is being served. An extended family of workers moves into Selim’s parents’ apartment; scruffy children play football in the streets; and Selim, whose aura of flâneur privilege has so far cocooned his aimless walks around the city in invulnerability, is accosted by two policemen at a deserted intersection, and beaten up.

It feels like the very beginning of the very end. The burning tanker, the noxious stench, the start of a flood, and a sucking, ravenous puddle of mud — fire, air, water, earth — all feel like symptoms of a single, greater elemental whole. Nature, in “The Gulf” is not malevolent, necessarily, just terrifyingly ambivalent toward us humans, and perhaps she just finally got a bit fed up. Now it’s the people who have always had the harder lives and the earthier problems, who are better equipped to deal with the new world disorder.

Yeksan’s portrait of generational malaise and middle-class dissociation is deceptively loose in execution for a film so dense with allegorical potential. Yet, like the occasional sparkle of amusement in Selim’s eye, it is enlivened by a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous, and an ending that improbably offers up the oddest cocktail of optimism with which to toast the oncoming End Times. The absence of a future, in this rich, absorbing if slightly overlong fable also means the end of our struggle to understand our place in the world, the end of the ceaseless striving for a further leg up on the social ladder. Indeed, perhaps the absence of a future simply gives us back the present and gives us a reason to reconnect with a world from which we can easily become estranged: the pleasures of the moment can be all the richer for the knowledge that there probably aren’t that many moments left. [B+]

Crossing Europe is a festival held annually in April in Linz, Austria, which celebrates the brightest and most idiosyncratic filmmaking from across the continent, with a particular focus on European socio-political themes.