TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 REVIEW! Gülizar is the feature-length debut of producer/writer/director Belkıs Bayrak. It tells the story of a young Turkish bride-to-be, Gülizar (in a stealthy, powerful performance from Ecem Uzun), and the crisis deepening around her after she is assaulted en route to her nuptials in neighboring Kosovo.
What impresses so much about Bayrak’s debut feature is that it employs the sober action of awards season drama but amplifies it just so. The opening act is a dull and bleary-eyed bus journey taken by Gülizar and her chaperone mother, Fatma (a nicely composed Hülya Aydin). Still, it is never less than gripping as presented through Bayrak’s sublime direction. She and cinematographer Kürşat Üresin deserve credit for taking ordinary and naturally lit locations and making them sing. The cinematography is forever canny, tracking the actors in the frame and forming associations with sly zooms. It almost appears to prey on its own cast like a stalker.
“…the story of a young Turkish bride-to-be…”
This stellar presentation supports the power of Bayrak’s story: a slender but devastating chain of events presented with a calm and unfussy elán. It presents us with an engrossing and intimate portrait of people going about their lives at the very edge of Europe.
On top of this, Ecem Uzun delivers a towering performance. She is a veteran of numerous television shows in her native Turkey and works wonders here. Uzun has staggeringly little dialogue (I would honestly be surprised if she spoke more than fifty words), but the camera never tires of her magneticism as the world falls from beneath her feet.
Uzun’s Gülizar is in thrall to the wedding that approaches, then to her horror at an encroaching and worrying sub-plot to do with fiancé Emre (a dignified performance from Bekir Behrem) as he begins to buckle in seeking recriminations against her attacker. As the plot moves inexorably along you understand why she has become seemingly frozen, but you want to reach into the frame and shake her into action. Her performance seems a reflection of sorts of Meursault in Camus’s The Outsider, only her seeming indifference is forced upon her by a little bad luck and the constant failures of others. Her sphinx-like form is her caring, as she burns inside, waiting to be rescued from a situation for which she has no Earthly blame.
"…Gülizar is assaulted en-route to her nuptials in neighboring Kosovo"
