Filiz Alpgezmen's directorial debut 'Stranger' centres around Özgür (Sezin Akbaşoğulları), a French born girl to Turkish parents, who took refuge in France after the Turkish coup d'état in 1980. Özgür apparently lost her mother years ago and her father seems to have brought up his daughter all alone. The 12 September 1980 Turkish coup d'état, headed by Chief of the General Staff General Kenan Evren had been one of the darkest patches in recent Turkish history. Thousands of people were arrested and blacklisted. Hundreds of people were judged on their political views. Many people were tortured to death. A lot of people were removed from citizenship.
Özgür's parents belong to this group of left-wing people who were removed from citizenship. When Özgür's father passes away, he leaves her a letter. All he wants is to be buried in his homeland. For someone who was stripped of his citizenship, that's practically impossible. The technical flaws of this movie starts from the moment when Özgür actually brings her father's body to Istanbul. The movie doesn't really explain how the heck the Turkish authorities accepts the body of someone who was stripped of his citizenship. If they do accept the body of this citizen why is the burial process tied up in bureaucratic red tape? Turks in Europe are known for holding onto their sub-identity even obstinately. Özgür was born and bred in France, so we can understand why she speaks Turkish with a French accent but remember she's the daughter of two supposedly revolutionary Turks. At the beginning of the movie, we hear the father's will in a voice-over. I don't know who did the voice-over but he clearly enunciates the name "Özgür' with a French accent. This doesn't make sense at all. When her father's case leaves Özgür caught in the meshes of heartless Turkish bureaucracy, she contacts her mother's relatives who harboured revolutionaries along with her parents before the coup d'état. I don't think, even a left-wing viewer would feel for Özgür in this loosely connected family life. Özgür has apparently never visited Turkey before. The way that her distant relative Ali on (Serkan Keskin) tells her how his father protected revolutionaries and how he was a tough revolutionary when he was just seven is far from credible. Here Özgür meets Ferhat (Caner Dindoruk) whose interest in her seems to be purely romantic. When Özgür can't cut through the red tape, Ferhat suggests she should go to see the relatives of her father too although her father stopped talking to them years ago. Her father's family seem to be a bunch of devout people. While Alpgezmen's criticizes bureaucratic status quo created by the coup d'état years ago, the fact she presents Özgür's father's relatives in a dim light doesn't really say anything new. Her father's relatives are just cardboard cut-outs. Either Algezmen wants to tell us 'beware their patina of piousness, it's only an act, these people can really enjoy talking about oral sex in a traditional circumcision ceremony ' or she just says 'they are ultimately responsible for the fate of revolutionaries like Özgür's father'. In either case, this is really a narrow-minded perspective. Apart from the soulless, gratuitous sex scene in the movie, the finale clearly shows that the filmmakers are too confused to tell a story. Are you telling the story about a girl who was uprooted from her origins, who has become alienated to herself or are you telling a story about community pressure? It's true that a lot of Turkish citizens feel that their identity, ideology and lifestyle are have been at stake since Erdogan came to power in 2002. Many people feel that he has ulterior motives behind his party's new alcohol regulations but this process (ever-increasing prohibitions and community pressure) could have been told in another movie separately. If the did so,it would not be all 'French' to the real story.
Maybe then, instead of this knee-jerk finale, the movie could have questioned the fact that Kenan Evren, the mastermind behind the 1980 coup is still a free man. Those who were actually engaged in coup d'état in 1980 are enjoying their freedom while those who were alleged to to stage a coup d'état recently have been heavily punished. (If you don't know what I'm talking about check out Gareth Jenkin's report: between fact and fantasy)
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