Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Metin Erksan's Time to Love (1965) is showing exclusively on MUBI starting November 3, 2022 in the series Rediscovered.
Time to Love (1965).
Growing up in İstanbul, it felt like there were islands everywhere. There were the geographical islands themselves: the Princes’ Islands that lie off the shore of the Anatolian coast, the largest of which is the major setting for Metin Erksan’s Time to Love (1965). There were the city’s neighborhoods with their various cultures, and sometimes even their favored languages. And then there were the more interesting ones, the invisible islands, those of stories half-remembered or almost completely forgotten, of the symbols and traditions they carry, looming like specters in a city that lies across not only two continents but a time frame of more than two thousand years.
Time to Love threads a bold path through all these islands of culture, convention, aesthetics, and perception, while also gathering together a gallery of islands of many forms of isolation, both modern and archaic. The film plays like what should be an impossible blend of your old-fashioned Yeşilçam (also lazily referred to as “Turkish Hollywood”) melodrama, with lovers from different social classes, and much more ancient forms of doomed romance, along with a strong aesthetic influence of 1960s European art cinema. All these aspects keep pushing and pulling at each other, shaping the film into Erksan’s most unique, peculiar, and personal work. The result is a dreamlike portrayal of the ultimate platonic love that a man, Halil (Musfik Kenter), a house painter, has for the likeness of a woman, Meral (Sema Ozcan), whose portrait he sees while painting their summer house on the island. The conundrum is that Halil refuses to take what would seem like the logical next step: a “real” relationship with the woman in the flesh, instead of the mere image of her. Though, of course, for Halil the image is not “mere” but all-encompassing: It’s a projection of his own fantasy.
Hence, the primary cinematic island in this rolling sea of contending influences becomes the portrait itself. As things are, Halil is wholly content in this space where his “beloved” is immutably a product of his own imagination, its frontiers set by his will. The picture frame serves as both a realm of dominion and prison, as most islands do in storytelling, since the time of Homer: For Halil it is dominion and for Meral, prison. The ferries that carry people to and fro the island; the small boat that Halil and Meral end up on; the windowpanes that Halil and Meral keep looking through at the mainland, at other islands, out in the emptiness, conceivably at each other; all of this and even the almost non-stop rain that blurs the windows and the features of the characters take part in Metin Erksan’s gallery of isolation. The temperament of this gallery bleeds into the temperament of the main characters, into how they conduct themselves in the face of overwhelming, imperious emotion.
Time to Love.
Throughout Time to Love there are numerous shots of the two main characters standing in the same frame but adamantly not looking at each other, as if any eye contact is bound to lead to some explosive calamity. There are so many such instances that even if the film had no central metaphor of the island, it would be impossible to escape the overwhelming sense of solitude that is deeply woven into the film’s fabric. “Violent delights have violent ends,” one might say, and Erksan would probably approve—after all, he not only went on record saying love pretty much amounted to insanity but also had enough appreciation of Shakespeare to make a Hamlet adaptation with a female lead. Still, Time to Love’s tale of star-crossed lovers is of a whole different kind from Romeo and Juliet, at once much a product of modern times and of timeless convention, not to mention more a tale of abstinence, even resistance, than indulgence.
And though the starkly beautiful shots of figures enclosed in their own mental islands and in varying degrees of physical separation are reminiscent of Antonioni’s contemporaneous trilogy on modernity, what’s at play here is not those films’ type of modern disconnect. Rather, Time to Love’s focus is on self-imposed separation that’s born of a deep-rooted, even ancient conception of love that manifests itself in folk tales, especially those of the East. This kind of love is bound to remain unfulfilled and fueled by longing, reclusion, and pain—fueled more by the imagination of the lover than any actual qualities of the beloved. It is the kind that can be kept alive and end up a monument unto itself. (“It was you who taught me to be solitary and brave in love,” says Meral at one point, resigning to this concept.) The kind one sees in folk tales such as Khosrow and Shirin, in which Shirin falls in love with the image of Khosrow in a painting, or Layla and Majnun, wherein Majnun holds on to the memory of Laila, his longing for her acting as both the wound and the healing salve.
What is particularly poignant is that writer-director Erksan himself ended up as sort of an island in the cinema of Turkey. Considered one of the pioneers of the social realism movement with films like Gecelerin Ötesi (1960) and Golden Bear-winning Dry Summer (1963), and an important figure in the “national cinema” discussions as well as one of the top names in what’s called “the filmmakers’ generation,” Erksan nevertheless was always the odd one out, never fitting neatly into any mold, and developed a style that was particular to himself. As visually expressive as his films were, with a pedigree in journalism and particularly film criticism, the written word and its storytelling conventions was always a huge source of inspiration: In addition to filming many book adaptations, he also sought ways of bringing the magical conventions of literature onto the screen. Time to Love was perhaps his boldest move in that regard. He was banking on the idea that the highly literary concept of falling in love with the image, the visual representation of someone, would work just as strongly on the screen as it does on the page or in oral narration—or perhaps, in some ways, even better. After all, we are used to reading about imagery in stories and poetry and conjuring up our own images, acting as the “directors” of our own film. But in film, the image itself is no longer this playground of co-creation; it comes pre-materialized, out there for us all to see, right across us, palpable. All probabilities collapse into the reality of the image itself. So in the cinematic realm, the picture of the beloved side by side with the beloved herself in the flesh creates this chilling doppelgänger effect that’s born purely out of the language of the medium. It is a dare, and the result is fascinating.
Time to Love.
Alas, “the image itself” proved a difficult idea to sell. When Erksan tried to get Time to Love released in theaters in 1965, there were no takers. A producer who advised against buying the rights to it went so far as to call the protagonist “this apparently crazy person” and particularly expressed his bewilderment at the sight of the other main character, “this freakish girl,” who kept walking around with a huge portrait of herself wrapped up in plastic. Buying the rights to it would be absolute madness, he argued.
Even if one would choose to call the almost surreal quality that lends Time to Love its unique character “madness,” they would have to admit that there is a method to it—as well as eerie, almost otherworldly charm. Erksan approached this project as an opportunity to really delve into the anatomy of the “insanity” called love. The result was a completely unprecedented, and in some ways still unmatched blend. In all probability what ultimately confused the film industry in 1965 was this very blend: Neither completely here nor comfortably there, thus ending up in the land of the uncanny, a netherworld of myth and folk tales—a magical cinematic island where a poor young guy becomes enamored with the looks of a rich girl but will hardly look at her in the flesh or accept her love in return.
Time to Love is truly an endeavor of passion and a shrine to obsession, one seeking the possibilities of bringing poetic imagery in its most literal form into cinema. It’s the film Metin Erksan really wanted to make.
Time to Love.