Hailed as the best Turkish movie that was received in the Venice Film Festival in 2007, A Fairground Attraction is a bittersweet, hopeless love story of two desperate lovers; Nurşen ( Zümrüt Erkin), a modern day flapper, wandering songstress reciting at the tents of a fairground and Cemal (Fatih Al) a worker who works at a construction site camped near the fairground. Unlike many of his peers, Cemal still hasn't settled down to have his own family. He's a single layman and he has to make both ends meet away from his mother. Nurşen, who has a troublesome past, has to make her own way in a fairground, which is traditionally dying out.
In his directorial debut, Mehmet Eryılmaz throws aside the well-worn romanticism that 'love conquers all'. He doesn't offer bromidic didactic lines. He has these two characters whom you can meet any time anywhere but he doesn't make two stereotypical characters, who parrot some time-worn love words, out of them. Even their dialogue is not conforming completely to any pattern that you might suppose that two people in love would have followed. As a viewer, you don't really know anything about these two characters except the little bits and pieces they are telling each other, which doesn't sound enough to know something about somebody so you do ask yourself why two people in love talk so little and when they do speak they don't tell much either. What makes them attracted to each other? Clearly, they don't feel it as a seasonal fling. They don't seem to physically make out either. Maybe they are simply attracted to each other because both of them are wanderers who don't have the independence to settle down anywhere. Maybe it's this very thing, the lack of this independence that they can't really be together no matter how much they're in love? The hopelessness of this love story, the essence of the misery of these wanderers against the backdrop the traditional fairground culture which has been dying out as a result of urbanization could be the reason behind Eryilmaz's systematic effort not to focus on the cinematography that could easily achieve bucolic grace with simple shots of a stunning landscape. As much as it's laudable that the film was shot in three different real fairgrounds, excluding real fairground performers seems to be a minus for this movie. With better dialogue, well-paced music, and a more convincing storyline this movie could be have been the crème de la crème. Still, it's a shame that this movie has been voted by only 13 people since it was released 4 years ago. It's well-worth your time.
In his directorial debut, Mehmet Eryılmaz throws aside the well-worn romanticism that 'love conquers all'. He doesn't offer bromidic didactic lines. He has these two characters whom you can meet any time anywhere but he doesn't make two stereotypical characters, who parrot some time-worn love words, out of them. Even their dialogue is not conforming completely to any pattern that you might suppose that two people in love would have followed. As a viewer, you don't really know anything about these two characters except the little bits and pieces they are telling each other, which doesn't sound enough to know something about somebody so you do ask yourself why two people in love talk so little and when they do speak they don't tell much either. What makes them attracted to each other? Clearly, they don't feel it as a seasonal fling. They don't seem to physically make out either. Maybe they are simply attracted to each other because both of them are wanderers who don't have the independence to settle down anywhere. Maybe it's this very thing, the lack of this independence that they can't really be together no matter how much they're in love? The hopelessness of this love story, the essence of the misery of these wanderers against the backdrop the traditional fairground culture which has been dying out as a result of urbanization could be the reason behind Eryilmaz's systematic effort not to focus on the cinematography that could easily achieve bucolic grace with simple shots of a stunning landscape. As much as it's laudable that the film was shot in three different real fairgrounds, excluding real fairground performers seems to be a minus for this movie. With better dialogue, well-paced music, and a more convincing storyline this movie could be have been the crème de la crème. Still, it's a shame that this movie has been voted by only 13 people since it was released 4 years ago. It's well-worth your time.