The Man in the Street

Sailing into Istanbul harbour, smuggling goods after a long sojourn away, come Yakub and Hasan. While Yakub's straight into the drinking dens and brothels, Hasan's losing control of the deal; except he hardly seems to care - he can't put away thoughts of Ayhan, his real love whom he abandoned here once before. There's an air of drunken melancholy about this film. At heart it seems to be a languorous dissertation on personal disquiet and disconsolation - there's some, slight sense of context (the dislocations of modern life and transient work, perhaps; every once in a while strangers stop as if in recognition of the camera, and regale us with observations, musings and wry remarks), but it makes little impression. Like a drunkard, Hasan seems governed by some foreign stimulus that we're not party to.