Suddenly

(Aniden, Melisa Önel, Turkey/Germany/Serbia, 2022)

Ever since Agnès Varda’s Cléo passed the agonising hours from 5 to 7 waiting for a medical result in 1962, world cinema has often set women on an ambulatory path, either escaping from, or coming to terms with, a looming health crisis.

This event is always a powerful catalyst: it forces a reconsideration of one’s current, sedimented life situation, and poses diverse options for a starkly different future.

Reyhan (Defne Kayalar) in Suddenly is a very modern heroine. She walks out on her husband and goes into hiding, spying on her family members and going so far as to take a menial job in a chintzy Istanbul hotel. Her life opens up to random, surprising encounters, unpredictable paths and unexpected friendships.

All the while, Reyhan is haunted by her long-lost career as a figure skater, and tormented by her rapidly deteriorating sense of smell.

Acclaimed photographer Melisa Önel’s second fiction feature evokes – with a reverential nod to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue (1994) – a kaleidoscope of moods and sensations, as filtered through the sensitive, largely wordless subjectivity of Reyhan. The thoughtful script is by Önel and writer-scholar Feride Çiçekoğlu.

Reyhan is like a phantom, blending in, appearing and disappearing amidst the textures and materials of urban existence. Kayalar’s performance captures – and this is no easy task for an actor – both the character’s solidity and her ephemerality.

© Adrian Martin December 2022