听 "It's all here: love, sex, betrayal, revenge, every trick in the book," explains the narrator of Istanbul Tales. Set over one night in the capital city of the title, this colourful but insubstantial drama follows five sets of characters, led by elderly musician Hilmi (Altan Erkekli), whose lives intersect after a powerful gangster is killed in a restaurant mob hit. Turkey's answer to the overlapping storylines of Amores Perros, it's all bark and no bite.
While an opening quotation from Argentinean fantasy writer Jorge Luis Borges - "Fate is partial to repetition, variation and symmetry" - suggests something intensely serious, this fast-paced film is actually more like a grown up fairy tale with a series of left-field plots. A transsexual prostitute tries to escape her pimp; the daughter of a dead gangster is saved by a dwarf. Elsewhere, a lost man is mistaken for a centuries old ghost, a drugs mule is bullied by her bosses and an ageing clarinet player is cuckolded by his beautiful young wife.
"THERE'S NO FAULTING THE DISTINCTIVE MOOD"
Each story is certainly intriguing, but the gradual revelation of their links to each other add little to the overall theme of fate's cruel hand. Perhaps it's the result of having four (count 'em!) directors in charge. Still, whatever the explanation, there's no faulting the distinctive mood. An anti-love poem to a city where the streets are apparently paved with fools' gold, it presents Istanbul as a place where dreams are wrecked by the minute: "Istanbul's finished anyway. It's time to leave for another land."
In Turkish with English subtitles.
