Can: Sundance Film Review

Park City — A sad, strange fable about a couple's compulsion to procreate, Tamer Çıray's Can has rough patches but gets more involving as it goes along. The Turkish import (the first to be in the World Dramatic competition here, the director says) should find admirers on the fest circuit and could draw a modest audience in an arthouse release.

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When young, kid-hungry couple Cemal and Ayşe (Serdar Orçin and Selen Uçer) learn he can't father children, Cemal feels it's a reflection on his manhood. He convinces Ayşe to adopt, padding her dresses for nine months so the boy will appear to be their natural child. But while he adores the boy they get, she refuses to love it for reasons that are never explained. Perhaps, while the most important thing for him is to appear to be a biological father, what she desires is the actual experience of pregnancy.

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In any event, after a year of frustration with his wife's deeply sour moods, Cemal leaves them both. He marries a beautiful rich girl, and when she becomes pregnant he knows just how uncommitted she is to the marriage. Years later Cemal is raising another man's daughter while his wife cuckolds him, and Ayşe, barely scraping by, is leaving her son Can to fend for himself all day in the park while she works as a floorscrubber.

Oddly, Çelikezer inserts little glimpses of this future into the film's first act, giving no clues to his chronology-hopping. For much of the time we're watching the cute six year-old Can (Yusuf Berkan Demirbağ) loiter on park benches and shoplift produce, we don't realize he's the infant the couple are in the process of adopting. The confusing structure isn't helped by the film's subtitles, which are badly translated and hard to read.

Ayşe's perpetual bad mood makes her fairly unsympathetic -- her face is an off-putting stone frown, and a scene's action has to be fairly dramatic to make watching her feel worthwhile. Can is a cutie, but the script never gives him much of a personality. Fortunately, things do get more interesting in the film's second half, and Ali Özel's rich cinematography is eye-pleasing throughout.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival, World Cinema Dramatic Competition

Production Company: Defne Film Prodüksiyon

Cast: Selen Uçer, Serdar Orçin, Yusuf Berkan Demirbağ, Erkan Avcı, Serhat Nalbantoğlu, İdil Yener, Erdal Cindoruk, Cengiz Bozkurt, Zeynep Yalçın, Güray Görkem, Kürşat Alnıaçık, Sait Genay

Director-Screenwriter-Producer: Raşit Çelikezer

Director of photography: Ali Özel

Music: Tamer Çıray

Costume designer: Sevda Cevik

Editor: Ahmet Can Çakırca

Sales: Defne Film Prodüksiyon, defnefilm@gmail.com

No rating, 106 minutes