PRESENT TENSE (Belmin Söylemez) Rating: NNNN
What do we really know about Mina (Sanem Öge), the cagey, quietly alluring heroine of Turkish director Belmin Söylemez’s Present Tense?
She lives alone, squatting in a condemned apartment block. She keeps a wooden box full of postcards, brochures and U.S. dollars hidden in a drawer. She’s been decoding destinies at the bottoms of other people’s coffee cups all her life – or at least that’s what she tells the smitten proprietor of Kafe Galaksi, who gives Mina a desperately needed gig telling fortunes. It’s her own future that Mina can’t quite envision. She just hopes it involves leaving Istanbul forever.
Present Tense is a sensitive character study in which the implicit reigns. Söylemez’s camera work mirrors Mina’s search for patterns and meaning in seemingly random details as she studies coffee grounds and her clients’ subtly shifting responses. An intriguing attention to minutiae – a water stain on a cracked ceiling, a hole in an old chair’s upholstery, a woman’s jewellery – and Öge’s meticulous, emotionally textured performance make this promising feature debut worth seeing.
Screens tonight (Thursday, August 22) at the Lightbox as one of eight films in TIFF Cinematheque’s Rebel Yell: A New Generation Of Turkish Women Filmmakers series. See listings.
