‘Beni Unutma’: Another romance gone brittle

Her presence was necessary to test whether I have become a cynic when it comes to the digestion of the İstanbulites’ nauseating middle-class love problems. Her profound cultural knowledge and emotional familiarity of the passing decade’s Turkish soap operas was rather useful in proving that indeed I am a bitter cynic with extremely high expectations of genuineness from a love story and that she remains content with settling for clichés along with bad editing and pace if the lead characters look desirable and are essentially just well-meaning kids with unlucky destinies.

In fact, my mother was rather disappointed when she realized that I was not crying at the end credits as she was wiping away her tears. She called me heartless.

Even if I am heartless and rather not fond of “Beni Unutma,” which is the newest derivative to the Turkish bourgeoisie romance genre (the contemporary cousin of the Yeşilçam melodramas that was started by Çağan Irmak’s “Issız Adam,” one must give credit to the filmmakers who succeed in accessing their target audience so cunningly, their audience being my mother, her friends and a select group of young women who are in love with lead Mert Fırat’s screen persona and possess a passion for scrutinizing carefully decorated set-pieces that could be in an issue of Maison Française.

But of course it all starts on a meet-cute. Adorable Vespa-riding modern elf Olcay (first-timer Açelya Devrim Yılhan) stumbles upon her hunky boyfriend (Kenan Ece) cheating on her, while Sinan (Fırat), who is engaged to the blond bombshell Ebru (Tuba Ünsal), has realized that the conventions and familial duties of marriage cramp his style. Olcay’s BFF Sevda (Melis Babadağ) takes her out to their favorite hipster bar for a couple of drinks, while Sinan’s male entourage is listening to his ranting about how he can’t handle the thought of his ex-fiancée’s mother. Then Sinan notices Olcay, they exchange one-line pleasantries that are the fruit of a failed attempt at writing flirty dialogue between a man and a woman. As the convention of love at first sight dictate, they are in love with each other on the spot.

Then follows a long montage sequence of approximately 20 minutes that is more suitable for a music video than a motion picture. The sequence shows these two beautiful people wandering the streets, holding hands, playing games, cuddling and making funny jokes while dressed for a catalogue shoot for Vogue. At some point Sinan introduces Olcay to his stern widow mother, while Olcay introduces Sinan to her poem-loving widowed father. They are the perfect pieces of the puzzle, really; they both have one dead parent and a curiously disturbing Freudian relationship with the living one. Our sweeter-than-sugar couple gets married in the most romantic setting that Marie Claire’s best wedding locations list can come up with and eventually conceives a child. We think that the rest of the film is going to be about how marital love fades away to middle class boredom, but no, the film suddenly turns about 180 degrees to a new focus and hits the couple with an agonizing tragedy.

Unfortunately I must insist on a spoiler: Olcay suddenly finds out that she is suffering from a rare kind of Alzheimer’s disease which will eventually rip her away of all her bodily functions and make her forget everything. Sinan is devastated, while Olcay is trying to hold on to dear life. Olcay has already started to act as if Sinan and their child do not exist. At this point the film transforms into a TV movie of the week special in which we unwillingly and methodically learn how a person with such an unfortunate disease withers away and we must succumb to the sorrow of poor Sinan as he slowly loses his wife. Here the filmmakers try to invoke the same kind of cathartic sensation when watching Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw in “Love Story.” It is for you to decide whether it works, but for some of us I assure it doesn’t.

The performances of leads Fırat and Yılhan are what make the film watchable, but an underdeveloped and unfocused script (despite its potential), poor pace and the lack of convincing sub-plots and supporting characters make “Forget Me Not” a forgettable watch for those who are expecting more from a filmmaker such as Kızıltan, the directorial talent behind the award-winning film “Takva: A Man’s Fear Of God.”

‘Beni Unutma’ (Forget Me Not)

Directed by:

Özer Kızıltan

 Genre: drama

Cast: Mert Fırat, Açelya Devrim Yılhan, Tuba Ünsal, Kenan Ece

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