Thou Gild'st the Even

A black and white film set in a small town. Cemal is a barber. He is married, has a child, and lives an ordinary life in his shop. He has one thing: he can stop time. He tells nobody and mostly uses it for small errands. Everyone in the town has something like it. One hovers in the air, one hears what nobody else hears, one never dies, and nobody finds this extraordinary. Cemal falls in love with a woman. Yasemin is a teacher and new to the town. From there the film is a dissolution. Betrayal, jealousy, a killing, and a life coming apart. What the narrative is interested in is not the fantastic but the ordinary: nobody in the film uses his ability for anything useful; they all struggle with the same small troubles and the extraordinary has become entirely boring. The dialogue is the film's real strength. The exchanges are short, dry and funny in unexpected places; the characters talk about heavy matters as though they were not talking about them. The black and white is a question of distance rather than style; without colour the fantastic elements look even more ordinary. It was shot in Akhisar, in the province of Manisa. The cast is large and made up mostly of well-known Turkish actors. The film won the Golden Tulip at the Istanbul Film Festival in 2013, along with best film, screenplay, editing and the FIPRESCI prize. Ali Atay, Demet Evgar, Damla Sönmez, Tansu Biçer, Ercan Kesal and Serkan Keskin are in the cast. Onur Ünlü wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes what is unusual in Turkish cinema and dry humour. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the fantastic elements to be explained; the film explains none of them and the last section is dark.