The Boston Turkish Film Festival ran from Friday, 3/24 through Sunday, 3/26 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and will continue through 4/29 virtually. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage!
Following Tayfun Pirselimoğlu’s Kerr from earlier in the Boston Turkish Film Festival, director Emin Alper’s cinephile darling Burning Days proves to be a straighter version of an unexpectedly similar premise. Both films follow male outsiders to small towns in rural Türkiye who become somehow involved in a violent crime. And get this, the similarities don’t end there: in both films, there are secondary (Burning Days) or tertiary (Kerr) plotlines involving the appearances of holes in the ground. In the latter, the holes are mysterious, small, and random, whereas the former’s plot is more or less initiated by the appearance of sinkholes that may or may not be caused by the over-extraction of groundwater.
Despite sharing so much on a plot level, the two films couldn’t be more different. Burning Days shoots with a more invisible style to not distract precisely and plays it straight precisely whereas Kerr has an experienced photographic style and knows how to have fun.
Emre (Selahattin Paşalı), a young and ambitious prosecutor from the city, finds himself in the middle of a political scandal concerning rural Yaniklar’s source of water. The mayor and his son Şahin (Erol Babaoğlu), who claim the support of the scientific findings suggesting the extraction of groundwater is not the source of the sinkholes, invite party pooper Emre over for an evening of food and drink not long before the upcoming elections. That night: a young and mentally disabled Roma girl (often pejoratively called the Gypsies), Pekmez (Eylül Ersöz), is raped and the do-good Emre, drugged, can piece together just enough of the night to scare the shit out of him.
Ersöz seems to be 21, but I’m not positive of the age of her character– I believe she’s younger—and I do recall hearing kız (girl) rather than kadın (woman), though I could be wrong. Either way, she’s disabled. Did he witness her rape and do nothing? Or worse…was he, Mr. Justice himself, the rapist? And yet, as a principled prosecutor, his own professional ethics simply don’t allow him to completely excuse himself: justice must come.
As a thriller, I’m not all that sure Burning Days works. As soon as Emre has his first flashback, helping him slowly piece together that awful night, the story only ever had one outcome. That doesn’t necessarily ruin it as a thriller: in fact, part of what makes thrillers so anxiety-inducing is the excruciating push to their inevitable outcomes. But you just don’t feel all that bad for him—drugged or not, he might be guilty of something pretty unforgivable.
I’m not Turkish, nor am I a student of modern Turkish history, but I have been learning the language for a few years now and have something of an interest in the country’s most recent political developments. All of that is to say that it doesn’t take a scholar to understand the critique of established politicians going on here. Alper, who holds a doctorate degree in modern Turkish history, approaches small-town politics with the baggage of a well-studied academic (and I mean this as a compliment). The particular is universal, and the universal is particular.
Burning Days
2022
dir. Emin Alper
128 min.
Part of the 2023 Boston Turkish Film Festival
