Black and White Love is not an ordinary love story of two young people attracted to each other, walk along the beach holding each other's hands, exchange some silly jokes and kisses and have some intimate scenes to tickle the audience's desires before a villain enters their "utopia" spilling ink and setting fire forcing them to fight back or unnecessarily suffer with lengthy boring cycles of unconvincing reconciliation and separation over hundreds of episodes.
"Siyah Beyaz Ask" is rather a tense and an unusual encounter between two apparently different people who by no means could have been partners otherwise. Having to know each other and to live with each other sparked an inner battle inside each of them with his own mind and feelings, expressed as a battle with one another as well as with others.
Knowing each other was the only way to learn about themselves, their fears, their possibilities and their soles. On their journey towards love they are mainly fighting themselves rather than fighting villains and their love had to get through a lot of questioning, insecurities, sacrifices and crises before being the major and most fixed fact of their lives.
The outline of the characters is finely written (thanks to the two initial writers), yet the main credit goes to the actors and the third (script) writer :
Ibrahim Celikkol put too much heart and power into every scene, and whether he is a killer in action, a lover in great despair, an estranged brother, a human being at war with his own feelings or a devastated person in a crisis of fury.. in all these he just acted like nobody. None of his other roles compares to his portrayal of Ferhat Aslan. Most importantly he added new aspects to the main character "Ferhat" both inside and outwards, starting with his vigorous portrayal of Ferhat's silent inner torment and not ending with the major effort he did to add a self-developed vocal tone to match Ferhat's specialised vocabulary and idioms.
Birce had been particularly excellent for the screwball comedy romance scenes as well as for the awakening dialogues when her character "Asli" touched deep into Ferhat's wounds (actually can't imagine any other Turkish actress for these particular types of scenes).
Despite being good-looking, and unlike other well-known Turkish actors, both actors didn't rely much on the way they look (apart from two intruding and unnecessary scenes of Ferhat's body boxing and bathing.) They rather dare appear in an unpleasant look (as when Ferhat tried to impersonate a beast "Çirkin" when he had been looking at himself in the mirror).
The third script writer "Erkan Birgören" did a great job writing sarcastic and powerful dialogues instead of the commonly used romantic dialogues under a starry night's moon or the philosophical conversations about love that no real lover uses. He was a real bonus for the series.
I rarely give a 9-10 but I believe a 9-10 for this series is well earned.
