‘Burning Days’ Review: A Sweltering, Stylish Small-Town Allegory for Corruption in Strongman Societies
variety.comJessica Kiang Compassion is in almost as short supply as water in Emin Alper’s sardonic, seething Un Certain Regard breakout “Burning Days,” a parched little parable about small-town corruption in chokingly patriarchal rural Turkey.
Beginning and ending on the lip of a massive sinkhole on the village outskirts, and featuring a manhunt that echoes a wild boar hunt and a mirage-like lake whose waters may or may not be toxic, here, the cool filmmaking is subtler than the metaphors.
But then, with mass detentions during the recent Turkish Pride celebrations still in the headlines, when it comes to homophobia, misogyny, masculine crisis and the other attendant cruelties of this strongman-led society, these are not subtle times.
A more genre-inflected movie than Alper’s Berlinale competition title “A Tale of Three Sisters” (which makes it also more accessible than the overtly Chekhovian theatricality of Turkey’s other Cannes darling, Nuri Bilge Ceylan), “Burning Days” benefits from Alper’s sparse, boiled-dry screenplay and from DP Christos Karamanis’s casually devastating widescreen photography.
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