Burn your hell. Thirty-year-old Selim returns from Istanbul to his native Izmir, where even his mother does not seem to be waiting for him. Soon a tanker lights up in the bay and the city begins to empty. Many people suspect that the stench did not come from the fire, repeating repeatedly: “It’s not a smog, it’s something else.” Selim does not wear a respirator and either gets used to the smell, or refuses to let the rot around him. He walks along the shore, falls into the mud and wakes up in the hospital, rescued by a mysterious friend.
“The Bay” is the most tendentious, but cool European film. Emre Yexan, in his first work, expressed everything that was expected of him as a Turk who lived in Europe for a long time. The background layer of the film is socio-economic, one might say class. An art layer is a painting, each frame of which can be hung on a wall. The work is collected, as a designer, from recognizable modern concepts, but most importantly, it withstands both genre and pace throughout the timekeeping. Two Biblical motifs play out here: returning at the beginning of the film and climbing the Golgotha at the end. Moreover, the return occurs first to the hometown, to the family, then to the past - through things and an ex-girlfriend, and all this is unsuccessful - and finally to yourself.
One of the facets of liberation is expressed through the Cerberus, who guards the things that Selim brought with him from a past life. The existentialist idea of inner hell found expression here in the form of material hell. The swamp in the corners of the empty room of the warehouse is the glutinous paste of being hell in others; but the nausea in the hero did not last long: he vomited and ceased to smell the smell from which everyone is fleeing, and the rot of others will no longer touch him. 1:0, Jean-Paul.
I must say that the entire Turkish creative intelligentsia is deeply counterintuitive, and in the presence of censorship it is an ideal environment for thoughtful creativity. The symbolism of the smell is political, and the author does not hide it; the hero’s refusal to resist expresses the idea of internal emigration, which seems to be popular in all opposition circles in the world. The director, showing the passive but not malignant hero on the edge of the conflict of decay and purity, constantly shows children next to him: only with them he comes alive and smiles. And the closer Selim is to zeroing himself, the more time he spends with children and the more he becomes like them.
The second most important hero, the purifier Jihan, is cut from three images, one of which is turned inside out: stalker-persecutor, stalker-conductor and stony-language “vergil”. He escorts the hero to the desired circle of hell and disappears from his life, and, the ways back for Selim are blocked: so we are informed that the appointment of the guide is fulfilled.
Apparently, because the film is autobiographical, the director seems to be present in the frame, constantly reminding himself of his findings. It does not allow you to drown in the film, keeps the attention on the surface. Here in each scene you can observe the trace of the author’s thought: games with light, fire and foreign words, the position of the bodies in bed, the annoying sound of the hood, the distant figure of the mother in a gas mask, the footstep from the policeman, birds laughing with Selim. Catharsis from Emre Yexan came out straight like a stick: a fire, punishment, pain and finally a cleansing laughter under the shower. The return to himself and people is transmitted through sound: an empty street is sharply filled with human talk and Selim opens the stream with his ascent. Yexan's design was much more depressing, but sometimes things write themselves. In The Bay, the author has to give hope to the hero, himself, and the viewer.
