“One wishes Çatak wouldn’t have taken such a heavy-handed approach in conveying rightfulness and shouting his message so loud.”

About the state of ambiguity we’re cornered into…

We’re living in a time where films do not have the luxury to be apolitical. But these are also tricky times with regards to how to address the political. Do you use vague symbolism that many outside the film festival circuit won’t grasp? Or do you adopt a heavy-handed, in-your-face attitude that will not please those festival audiences much, but despite a risk of cinematic blandness can actually make an impact on people outside of this echo chamber. There must be a balance to be found in there. That’s the way important films have always done it, even now and in the future. It’s a tough sweet spot to hit though, probably even more difficult than the choices Derya and Aziz have to make in İlker Çatak’s Yellow Letters.

A power couple in the state-funded theatre scene, famous actress Derya (Özgü Namal) and her esteemed playwright/drama professor husband Aziz (Tansu Biçer) face a legal entanglement because of a political play they staged. Ostensibly this is Ankara, the capital of Türkiye. But despite the language, the names of the city’s districts, and the specific sounds of the world surrounding the characters, Ankara is Berlin. Istanbul is Hamburg. Türkiye is Germany. There’s no subtlety here, as Çatak reveals his unique geographical trick openly through title cards. What he sets out to do is to take what any intellectual, academic, or artist is experiencing in Türkiye right now, and expand it to not just Germany, but the whole of Europe and the world. Yellow Letters depicts a situation that, in this age of the rise of totalitarian regimes, can occur anywhere these days. As specific as the plot is to current Turkish politics, a lot of people from different regions can surely relate, be it in Hungary or Brazil or the US right now.

Derya and Aziz find themselves fired, unemployed, in debt, and unsure how they can provide for their daughter’s future. They reach a point where there’s no other choice than to move in with Aziz’s mother in Istanbul, to ask Derya’s nationalist conservative brother – who they stayed away from for many years – for financial help, to work as a taxi driver or to accept a role in a soapy TV drama by a pro-government broadcaster. These are not easy choices for anyone, but prove even harder for Derya and Aziz, who apparently have been living quite disconnected from the reality around them. It makes you wonder why they wrote and performed such a political play in the first place. They are parents and can’t really see how they can put activism selflessly at the center of their lives like some of their friends do. So, were they drawn to the prestige factor of making a political allegory? Was it just the ego and the hubris of the intellectual that drove them to make such a politically loaded statement with their play?

Yellow Letters delves into these questions, but sometimes loses and confuses the audience along the way. Because staging your own independent play in a private theatre and accepting the lead role in a commercial TV show are not two opposites; they do exist side by side in our reality. Derya can do both: get naked on stage for the sake of art while playing shallow scenes of cheap intrigue on TV every week, and take credit for both and financially survive. Yet Derya and Aziz, and therefore Çatak, treat them like two sides of a coin. They are not, and that’s already part of the point the film is trying to make.

The dialogue quite clearly tells us that ambiguity drives the story. An oppressive regime drives its opponents into such impossible corners that eventually everything turns ambiguous. You can’t tell if you have survived or are imprisoned, and if the ground beneath your feet is reliable anymore. At the end of the film we find Aziz staring at the sky through the glass ceiling of his wife’s set trailer. No one can say they failed at that point, but it’s also impossible to tell if they got out of this mess with their heads held high. They are in an ambiguous state, stuck in some safe zone or echo chamber in which they hold no actual power to change anything anymore. Aziz once truly believed that theatre could save the world. He probably still thinks that way. Maybe getting naked on the stage himself and being praised for it will create this illusion of achieving something. But any mechanism to materialize real change has been taken away from them. They’ll survive, and sadly because there is nothing else left to do.

Ironically, this is also the film’s very own cul-de-sac (and Yellow Letters is not alone in this): making a political statement at the Berlinale through your film, but not being able to equally make a statement about the platform where you’re showcasing it. Getting accolades, getting backlash, but not being able to actually affect anything. Have film festivals become another oppressive force to drive us into ambiguity? We watch the films, the press conferences, the red carpets. Or we make the films, answer questions about them, appear on red carpets. But just like Aziz looking at the sky through a glass ceiling, it is impossible to tell if we actually made any impact or simply became puppets of a system that cares only about its existence. Can we still keep our heads held high? Çatak proved himself to be a strong communicator of the ethical dilemmas of a single character in The Teachers’ Lounge. But in Yellow Letters, with a much bigger scope and pretty strong acting and technical elements, one wishes he wouldn’t have taken such a heavy-handed approach in conveying rightfulness and shouting his message so loud.

A film cannot offer us solutions, filmmakers always tell themselves that. And it’s true. A film is as precious as the questions it offers, questions we need to find our own answers to. Hopefully, not on the stages dictated by states, or the forces that be, but rather out in the streets instead, and on our own forums and platforms. Aziz was maybe naïve in trying to teach that to his students; some of them even ended up snitching on him. But some of them still went on to join those in the streets. Is there any other way?

(c) Image copyright – Ella Knorz_ifProductions_Alamode Film