Issız Adam

When Issız Adam ended, I called my mother.

That remains the most precise review I can give the film.

There was no family crisis behind the call. I loved my mother and knew she loved me. We simply belonged to a family in which affection usually preferred practical clothing. A plate of food appeared. Someone asked whether I had taken a jacket. You were told to call when you arrived.

The language of love was often logistical.

For some reason, after the film, that no longer seemed sufficient.

I realized I had almost never called her anneciğim. The word felt strangely formal in my mouth precisely because it was supposed to be intimate. I picked up the phone before I could become embarrassed by the idea.

We talked about ordinary things.

That was appropriate.

The film had made me think about how much of love is hidden inside ordinary things.

Alper’s life is attractive from the outside. He has independence, taste, work he controls, a home organized around himself, and nobody demanding explanations. There is a genuine pleasure in that arrangement. Solitude can be efficient.

It can become too efficient.

When you live alone for long enough, every routine adjusts perfectly to one person. Nothing has to be negotiated. The music is always acceptable. Plans can change without consultation. Silence never needs to be explained.

Compromise begins to feel like a defect in the system.

Then another person enters.

Ada’s presence creates the very inconveniences that intimacy requires. Another schedule, another preference, another person’s disappointment. Love becomes less a feeling than a disturbance in a previously optimized life.

I understood that more than I wanted to.

The film helped me distinguish two conditions that can look identical from outside: being capable of living alone and needing to remain alone.

The first is independence.

The second can become fear with good furniture.

Alper’s tragedy is not that he cannot feel. He feels enough. What he lacks is the ability to reorganize his life around what he feels. Loving someone and knowing how to live with someone are separate skills.

We speak as if the first automatically installs the second.

It does not.

The film also returned me to family because parents create a special illusion of permanence. They have always existed in our lives, so we behave as though they will continue indefinitely. Calls can be postponed. Visits can happen next weekend. There will be another holiday.

The ordinary questions that irritate us—Did you eat? Where are you? When are you coming?—contain almost no poetry while we are hearing them.

Later, they may become poetry.

I do not remember the details of the conversation with my mother that night. I suspect she asked whether I had eaten. I probably said yes even if the answer was complicated.

What I remember is making the call.

Years later, I am less interested in deciding whether Issız Adam is a perfect film than in the fact that it changed my behavior for one evening.

Art does not always need to transform a life.

Sometimes it only needs to make the phone ring at the other end.