Turkish director Yeşim Ustaoğlu returns with a beautifully shot, superbly performed exploration of a modern couple embarking on separate journeys of self-discovery. If you love something, let it go, the adage advises, and maybe it will come back to you. Maybe, however, it will go and go and go and never come back, and that, so Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s increasingly lyrical and persuasive “What Remains” would have it, might be its own sort of reclamation.
The slowly built, gently revolutionary assertion of this delicate film is that there are some relationships that are stronger and deeper after separation; some lovers who love best with a lot of air and wind between them and you. Perhaps the more space opens up around them, the more affection they generate to fill it. And perhaps that’s because there are some — you could call them introverts, you could call them solipsists, or you could cut straight to the point and call them writers — who have an essentially solitary streak, no matter how profound and various their attachments to others.
Elif (Ökyü Karayel) is one such, a poet of some renown in her native Turkey who has not written a lot recently, or rather, what she has written does not seem to scratch the poet’s itch; whatever creative wellspring she relies on is running dry, its waters coming up sludgy and brackish. Instead she spends her days feeding the curiosity of her bright, precocious son Selim (Ali Kayra Kul), going on long walks through hilly urban Istanbul, watching over a jar of cocooning butterflies and helping him build Rube Goldberg devices in the living room of their pleasantly bohemian apartment. One room of it has recently been converted into a studio of sorts for her partner Mehmet (Metin Akdülger), an experimental musician who is as likely to want to record the sound of a malfunctioning kitchen appliance as to fix it.
It all builds up a picture of quite a privileged, if hardly lucrative, creative-class lifestyle, and in the early going there is a slight sense that maybe too much of our attention is being lavished on this attractive family unit and their rather wan predicaments. But then Mehmet is let go from his job teaching esoteric music practices to university students and the household’s sole steady source of income is gone. It precipitates an argument between the couple — the whispered-so-as-not-to-wake-the-kid kind — in which Elif’s unhappiness comes out haltingly, inarticulately, and all of Mehmet’s suppressed resentments too, as we finally get some idea of just how dysfunctional they have become.
Elif has not showered in weeks and barely eats. Mehmet tries to proffer practical solutions but each one only seems to deepen the rift. Later there is a kind of ceasefire and they make love in the shower into which Mehmet has bodily dragged her.
But it is not a reconciliation, it is a farewell — as the next day before daybreak, Elif gets in the car and starts to drive, out of the city into the changing countryside of Turkey, through tunnels and along highways, amid vast empty landscapes and past ancient cities that rise from the plains like the citadels of a fantasy epic. At some point on her hitherto aimless road trip, she realizes where it is she wants to go: to the tiny village in the mountains where her grandmother lived out her days. This is not an abandonment.
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