Yoksul

Yoksul makes tea in a large office building. He carries everyone's tea, does everyone's errands and says no to nobody. Süleyman, who owns the tea stall, makes use of that. The girl he is in love with, who works in a textile workshop in the same building, keeps borrowing from him and never pays it back. Then Kerim Bey, one of the businessmen in the building, tells him how he ought to behave. After that conversation something changes. Zeki Ökten directs. Kemal Sunal plays Yoksul, with Şehnaz Dilan, Yaman Okay and Kerem Yılmazer in the cast. That Kemal Sunal is working with Zeki Ökten is what stands out. Ökten directed social realist films such as Sürü, and here he is trying to move Sunal outside the mould of comedy. The subject is not kindness but kindness being used as a weakness. The film does not praise Yoksul's innocence; it shows how the people around him treat it as a resource. The office building carries the whole film as a location: different trades on different floors, different classes, and a small economy working inside one address. Sunal's playing is close to his familiar type, but the register changes toward the end and the film leaves comedy behind. Who it is for: viewers who follow Kemal Sunal's films and Turkish cinema of the eighties. Who it is not for: the narrative is slow, the humour is sparse, and the film goes somewhere else than a viewer expecting Sunal's comedy would want.