The Hard Life of the Working Class in Turkey The winner of the 35th Moscow Film Festival is the picture of the Turkish director Erdem Tepegoz “Particle”. Moreover, “Golden George” received not only the film, but also the actress who played the main role – Zhale Arykan. Judging by the number of reviews on the network and the ratings of the film, we can talk about how much the Russian audience is interested in festival cinema and the Moscow festival, in particular. And reviews - almost zero. That is, no one wanted to see the prize-winning picture and write how much he liked it or did not like it. A lot of time has passed since the award. In general, our viewer saw our festival in a coffin, and the awards do not recognize it. But it is, general observation. As always, I made up my mind after watching the film carefully.
The film tells us about the hard life of the working class in Turkey. The example of one single middle-aged woman named Zeynep. The description of the picture is pretentious and stupid, as if the annotation was written by a beginner: “The universe consists of an infinite number of tiny particles – like a city full of suffering.” In general, a brief explanation why the painting was called a “particle”. In theory, it would be more logical to call it the “Working Unit”, because the poetry, which is full of annotation, is not observed in the picture – a solid prose of life. At the beginning of the film, Zeynep is kicked out of a weaving factory, and – cruelly, apparently, for some serious misconduct, which is not shown to us, she looks for any part-time job, sells lavender bags on the street, just to make ends meet. An evil landlord threatens to evict her from the tiny apartment where she lives with her daughter and mother. She finds work, but to do this, you have to go miles away - and even there they pay little, you have to sleep on foul-smelling mattresses in some shop where rats run. The director did everything that Zeynep was painfully pathetic - to enhance the effect, she periodically has blood flowing from her nose. In general, health is not too good, and she has to carry heavy bags and wash mountains of dishes.
At a certain point, it seemed to me that the director himself begins to laugh at his characters - when the owner of the apartment knocks down the door, and the dorky brother Zeynap builds some kind of castle out of a fork and rope. Again, the heroine is afraid of blood donation - and it is pathological. Although donors are known to do this regularly, recently in Russia, as in many Western countries, it is also free of charge. The question: “Who will get it?” also, in theory, should cause laughter, but I did not leave the feeling that all these “ridiculous” moments happened to Tepegoz by chance, he did not realize that it was funny.
In the photos on the network Jale Arykan, by the way, looks very attractive woman. But in the picture, this is really a pathetic Turkish woman with a big nose, from which blood flows constantly - an extremely sad sight.
I wondered if such a film would be in demand in the USSR or not. On the one hand, we produced many pictures about the joys of factory labor and working-class life, full of positive creative energy. “Particle” does not fit into this concept. On the other hand, we like to show how workers are oppressed in developed capitalist countries. And this picture is essentially about the oppression by the system of one single “particle” from which capitalist society is built. In this case, Turkish. Why not suffer the Turkish working woman oppressed by the capitalists, as the jury of the 35th Moscow Film Festival unanimously did?
3 out of 10