Yengec sepeti

It's a 1994/95 Turkish film I picked up in Istanbul earlier this year; got lots of prizes at Turkish film festivals. It's of the 'family reunion - all troubles will erupt' genre.

An elderly couple decides, on the spur of the moment, to invite their four children with partners as appropriate and grandchildren, for a weekend in their country house, a fairly small one-story wooden house but also with a stable with some very fine horses, set by a lake (I assume not many of my readers are familiar with Turkish country houses). The children are all successful in their professional lives (though the policeman's interrogation methods would not endear Turkey to the EU), but some of their personal lives are a bit of a shambles. One is divorced, one married but has an affair, one has girlfriends and the fourth one is alone. A review mentions that this is a modern Turkish family; something I had not thought about but it's right enough; no headscarves here.

As always in these films, the weekend starts well, but there are undercurrents, which erupt when the husband of the divorced woman turns up to see his daughter, and gets beaten up badly by the policeman.

It's quite a pleasant film - even the momentary violence is tastefully done -, but also fairly predictable. The subtitles suffer from absence, when they don't suffer from grammatical or spelling mistakes.

The father of the family is a stunning-looking elderly gent, but he does not have much of a speaking role - being something of an observer in his family's dramas. There are nice landscapes, too.