ozged
It is an okay film if you don't have great expectation.It shows a good portrait of the dull lower "class" Turkish people's life;their naive yet unreachable dreams,their hopes,their struggles,their obstacles.When they were supposed to go to college,two main characters were working for financial support.They desire the things that is normal for their peers.They feel trapped but they have no where to go,no money on top of those their families' expectations and society's prejudices have weigh on them much more and their struggle to escape in any way crashes into wall.But i didn't like the second half,unlike first half this part wasn't very well developed ,there were things i couldn't understand.End was okay but process could be better.Film made me think but when movie ended,first thing crossed my mind was it could have been better.
avzwam
Araf begins with a shot of a giant pot on a train of what looks like sand tip over at a sluggish pace. At one point it becomes clear that it only seemed sand on the surface. In fact it is burning hot, orange glowing, molten metal that pours out of the pot.This pre title shot is a great idea for a beginning. One that is promising. It's like it tells you something about what you are about to see. But what I saw in the movie was only so interesting. The pot metaphor deserved a better movie.You get a peek into the lives of these characters but we don't see anything that is particularly surprising. For instance who doesn't know that a lot of people are longing for things out of their reach? Or that there is domestic violence? Or that there are unhappy marriages? What's the point of showing all these things?The miscarriage is a false note to me. It doesn't fit with the rest of the film because of the way the scene is filmed namely too shocking and uncomfortable. And the marriage in jail seems too much of a "fairytale" ending to me. I think it should have ended less brightly.But although it is far from a complete success as far as the script is concerned and I question the point of showing a lot of what the film shows, I do feel that it's a movie which has its heart in the right place and which a lot of the time does what it sets out to do rather well.
Avery Hudson
"Every moment that we haven't seen, heard, touched or smelled before will start to reverberate in us in a very different way and take another form once we experience it. In Araf, I tried to touch upon those fleeting moments and feelings that can occur." – Yeşim UstaoğluIn a disintegrating town midway between Istanbul and Ankara, two teenagers search for something better. A girl (in a luminous performance by Neslihan Atagül) starts to pursue the desire awakening in her body while the boy-next-door hopes that a TV show will change his life.Molten slag breaks forth. A windshield wiper does not stop rain. And nothing can be the same.
zeki_p
In her 5th feature, Yesim Ustaoglu celebrates the ingenuity of approaching to the story of today. Remarkable observations on regular lives in a small town of Turkey leads a sudden empathy of viewer. In Karabuk, a town on the main road between two biggest cities of Turkey, Istanbul and Ankara, everyone and everything is passing by and that transience causes a strong gap between the present and the future, on its inhabitants. Specifiying this transition point trickily symbolize the zeitgeist of Turkey, stumbling between modern and traditional. In such atmosphere, characters feel the same stagnancy while dreaming about a sudden and easy way to slip through the net, and waiting for a miracle, whatever it's about-money, love or happiness. Such representation of today and -what I like most about Araf / Somewhere in Between is- its bold language, are the elements which make the movie extremely strong and success to make the audience feel being stuck, so an identification.
AD
