Majority

Sometimes a debut feature startles by virtue of the simple clarity of the story it tells. Such is the case with first-time feature director Seren Yüce’s Majority, which transforms a sober account of family life into a trenchant social critique.
The film revolves around Mertkan, the shiftless scion of a middle-class family and the heir apparent to his autocratic father’s construction company. Mertkan works so hard at upholding his image as a freewheeling young man with no responsibilities that he has lost interest in pretty much everything: cruising the malls with his friends, smoking in his dad’s SUV or working for his father’s business all bore him equally. He feels no need to plumb for any meaning in life or any inkling of a professional calling.
When he meets Gül, a young woman putting herself through university by working as a waitress, Mertkan seems poised to break out of his empty routine. However, his family disapproves of his new girlfriend on the grounds of her being a minority from the Eastern city of Van; their values are too imposing for Mertkan to challenge. He is, after all, unaccustomed to doing anything that requires real effort.
While setting out along the arc of a coming-of-age narrative, Majority builds to much more. Through Yüce’s examination of one man’s choices – or perhaps his lack thereof – the film offers an alarmingly realistic study of a stratum of Turkish society that nurtures nationalism and militarism through the seemingly innocuous relationships of parents and their children. The fact that the film is set within a liberal and modernized Istanbul makes Mertkan’s inability to shun tradition all the more ironic. Majority emerges as a study of the inertia of private values that can co-exist with a fast-changing public sphere. –TIFF