Film

Alone (Issiz Adam)

Cert: 15

Description: Talented chef Alper is a genius in the kitchen but a failure in affairs of the heart, ricocheting between one-night stands and escort girls, who provide him with the fleeting company he desires. During the search for an old record, he wanders into a second-hand bookshop in the back streets of Beyoglu and falls under the spell of customer Ada, who makes fancy dress costumes for children and is looking for a particular, old book. Determined to make this beautiful woman's acquaintance, Alper finds and purchases the book and thus begins a passionate affair. While Ada luxuriates in the attentions of a new man, Alper begins to feel suffocated by a permanent fixture in his crowded universe and questions whether he is capable of commitment.

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Dir: Cagan Irmak.

Cast: Cemal Hunal, Melis Birkan, Yildiz Kultur

Country: Turk.

Year: 2008.

Duration: 115mins

Audacious Alone has poise

Irreconcilable differences: Melis Birkan and Cemal Hunal

By Derek Malcolm
12 Mar 2009

This hugely successful Turkish pot-boiler is about a young man in Istanbul who restlessly visits prostitutes to get his weird kicks � and then falls in love with a girl who is really not into that sort of thing. But he can�t contain his more outlandish sexual desires.

Director Cagan Irmak shoots this with some poise and it�s decently acted by Cemal Hunal and Melis Birkan. For a Turkish commercial movie, it has a bit of audacity about it but cynical Westerners may ask why the man doesn�t just marry her and indulge his more unorthodox sexual hobbies on the side now and then.

Mistresses are, after all, not entirely unknown in Turkey.