elsinefilo Review of Umut Adasi

Umut Adasi (2006)

A genuine human drama marred by stereotypes and stilted dialogue.

[30 September 2012]

The real life stories of naive people falling prey to ruthless, opportunist human traffickers are not unfamiliar for Turkish people as we're accustomed to see illegal immigrants' boat sink off Turkish coast, killing scores every year. Turkey is the transit road for any illegal immigrant who wants to go northern Europe. The flow of Kurdish, Arabic, and Pakistani, Afghan, African and Iranian etc people who travel to Turkey to enter Greece through vessels crossing the Mediterranean is hard to constrain. The lives of an estimated number of 1 million or more illegal immigrants in transit from Turkey to Europe should be an easy kick to create a well-planned, well-executed genuine story out of heart-rending human drama. Unfortunately, Turkish cinema hasn't been much productive to create realistic stories about the plight of these people. Greece, which accuses Turkey of being negligent of its neighborhood duties and trying to change the Greek social and ethic profile hasn't even produced a movie on this matter. While fellow Turkish cinema-makers in Germany is trying to tell the stories of Turkish Gasterbeiter in Germany with movies like "Head-On" "Kurz und schmerzlo", "Chiko" and "Willkommen in Deutschland", we haven't seen any stories about the lives of Turkish immigrants in other countries like England and Belgium. For that matter, the place of "Umut Adası" in Turkish cinema is different. In his first directorial debut, Mustafa Kara tries to tell the story of a bunch of young Turkish illegal immigrants each of whom comes from different backgrounds. Asil (Halef Tiken) who is a bodyguard at a nightclub is running away from police because he man-slaughtered a guy in the middle of a bar fight. Yusuf (Gürkan Tavukçuoglu) wants to get away from his small hometown after he lost his father, the only close relative he had. Vildan (Arzu Yanardağ) a university graduate who has au pair connection to improve her English has to leave her father, the only parent she has. Tuğra (Alihan Yücesoy) a rich playboy who tries to find meaning in his life joins a team of smugglers to know more about those helpless people. As much as this sounds like an engaging story with interesting characters, Mustafa Kara makes a common mistake in his fledgling take into the life of illegal immigrants. He stereotypes every character he creates. The Turkish characters do all seem to be coming from traditionalist families. They have strong familial connections at the beginning. However, their strong ties seem to be easily broken up when they meet up Westerners who are again stereotypically titillated by the enticements of the flesh-sex, drugs and alcohol. Yusuf becomes a junkie because of he becomes infatuated with a scantily-dressed English girl. Vildan becomes a whore because she can't stand the attitude of her dike landlady. Asil forms a new romantic attachment just because the opportunity rose up. That sort of loose, occasional character development undermines the genuinity of this story. The stilted, poor dialogue is another minus for the movie. When the illegal immigrants travel under cramped conditions in a densely packed vessel they start to talk about each other. One of the characters says: "My brother is in Man- What was that? - Manchester." We're living in a global world and even an uneducated Turk knows about Manchester these days. When you try to make something more believable that it already is, you may achieve the opposite and then it just sounds so idiotic. English teaching course in the movie did sound dubious too. ESL world stopped that "repeat after me" thing years ago. Serious language courses teach their students with native speakers through communicative methods. You don't have to go all the way up to England to be tutored by a non-native ESL teacher with an accent. A self-motivated learner of English with Raymond Murphy':s Grammar in Use under her armpit is not a sight for only Londoners either. The fact that all our characters turned out to be a bunch of misfits who found the straight path by returning to their homeland sounds like it's doing injustice to millions of Turkish people who have accomplished something as legitimate European citizens.