Time to Love

This is one of those movies that i am not just glad i found and watched it but even happy. I thought that it was going to be something like a copy of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD and other similar arthouse drama/mystery/romance movies, for instance movies of Alain Robbe-Grillet. I was wrong. Whereas i still believe MARIENBAD is a better movie, TIME TO LOVE is absolutely unique and has its own identity. This is an original movie, obviously a work of passion which any romantic person will like it, at least. An incredibly affected and emotional movie, more like a fairy tale of course. Or more like a poem than a realistic movie. The characters are more symbols than people with flesh and blood, although at the same time, they express real feelings, facing real life difficulties and having real reactions towards another or other people.

Stylistically, it's gorgeous. Actually, this is one of the most beautiful movies i have ever watched. There will be a lot of people who won't like this movie for various reasons and i get it, but its beauty, in terms of film making, is undeniable. But this is not just a STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE movie. When the protagonist says that he loves her photograph and not her, in the beginning of the movie, it's obvious what he means. There is no ambiguity here and pretentiousness, everything is clear.

Regarding of the actors, i think the leading couple was great. I was rooting hard for them, they were loveable as characters too.

I was going to rate it even higher but i didn't like the last minute. The rest of the final 5 minutes is pure magic. It was heading towards one of the most powerful endings in the history of drama/romance movies, if not the most powerful. But still, it was not one of the endings which ruin a movie. It remains amazing.

Erksan's usage of objects and symbols to create a contrast between Halil and Meral leads people to comment on these characters generally on the basis of their way of life in accordance with their cultural background and origin representing West and East. However, I think the very core of the different sights of these characters comes not from the set of cultural codes but from the unique sense of world-views appearing in their stances whenever there is an act of contact between two.

There is, however, a certain difference between these two as Meral's reaction to an emotion is something rather prepared and ordinary compared to Halil's point to make a beginning. Meral is nearly a stereotype from the life of a woman who is rich but depressed, having a relationship from her own circle but without the affection of an idealized love, looking for a way out, an adventure. With this kind of a state of mind, she never commences with the romance itself when she meets Halil, it is only a prepared starting point, a railway instead of a junction. She simply finds her reason to live, a story that is known from the beginning with no intention of a subjective initiative. I think this is the very reason that she is seen with her two friends in the beginning, three women, copies of a same kind.

Her picture, on the other hand, is something else. Her picture is Halil himself, his all reason, affection, story of a different origin. Halil starts off with this picture itself unlike Meral, as far as we know at least, because Meral's situation is given with her own statements when she talks to Basar as she explains that she already did not love him anyway and she was not thinking that people can love actually, and besides all these, her whole situation coming to existence only as a reaction, not as a construction. This difference creates the possible conflict expected between two characters which is later destroyed by the movie's melodramatic tendencies, unfortunately.

Halil's stance and perspective differ greatly from that of Meral's and many people as well. He reveals an awareness of a certain progress presenting a blurred sense of inanimation filling the space for an irrationalized status of an emotional story that which we call love as inanimation creates a necessity for a subject to be aware of his own effort leading to a progress as opposed to the animate circumstance of two subjects inside the same story. By creating and constructing his own story Halil has a unique sense of authority of his life collecting emotions from an unprecedented source unlike a ubiquitous presence of a romance.

Apart from all these, Halil's well-established stance towards love and life and the movie's originality, in the time of a melodramatic madness in Turkish cinema, cannot escape from that fictitious and synthetic atmosphere. That destruction vitiates the movie beyond measure. It may be about the production problems for Metin Erksan, but without a doubt that melodramatic sense of storytelling debases the movie.

Directing: 6 /Acting: 7 /Story: 6 /Production values: 6 /Suspence - Thriller level: 3 /Action: 3 /Mystery - unknown: 7 /Romance level: 10 /Comedy elements: none

10/10. I admit I'm no Turkish cinema expert since they only cover 2,4% of all movies I've seen. I could easily say Nordic movies which covers more than 10% in my list, have better concerns for my cinema cause. Having these fun-facts, I'd never imagine a Turkish director would be the person who shot the closest thing as in Ingmar Bergman's style.

Another fact: Persona: 66', Sevmek Zamanı:65'

The difference between "cold/liberal Northern European culture" and "a culture which is heavily exposed agitated stories of arabesque style" referred to Turkish people might have seem major. But not in this surreal movie composed by the beautiful elements of experimental cinema and Rembet music. Great camera-work definitely helps Sevmek Zamanı to create a category in my taste as the most beautiful cult movie of my homelands

'Time to Love' is one of the best films of its time, not only in Turkey, but also in the world. Of course, in addition to director and screenwriter Metin Erksan and his staff, Musfik Kenter and Sema Ozcan, cinematographer Mengu Yegin also had a large share in it.