Yazi tura [Toss Up] (2004) - Ugur Yücel

Yazi Tura (Toss Up) is the film of two stories taking place in 1999. Stories of two young men… One is "Ridvan the Devil", a young football player from Central Anatolia, Cappadocia / Goreme, and the "Cevher the Ghost", a young man who is living with his father in Istanbul. Both went to the army together, and fought in the Eastern Anatolia. Both had dreams and expectations for their civil lives back home. After their military service Ridvan goes back to his village with his right leg missing, the leg that he would score goals with, due to a mine explotion. Neither his fiancée nor his friends treat him the way before. What Ridvan has been through during the war actually brings him down with time. In the same mine explosion Cevher also lost his hearing ability of his right ear, but he is going to go through a greater change after he rescues his father from the wreckage of the Marmara Earthquake.



The Land of “Manly Men”: Masculinity, Nation, and War in a Turkish Film
by Firat Yucel. Translated from the Turkish by Ekin Yasin

Yazi Tura/Toss Up (2004) is directed by Ugur Yucel, a leading theater and film actor in Turkey. The film was shown and recognized in numerous international film festivals. Through distinct yet connected narratives, the film centers around two main characters that have recently returned from serving their army duty in the South East region of Turkey where there is an ongoing conflict with the Kurdish forces in the region. Through the telling of two stories, in the first story, Ridvan becomes crippled during the war and Cevher, the main character of the second story, looses his hearing in one ear. The film poignantly portrays their interrelated stories and depicts their struggle to return back and adjust to their everyday lives after the war. Through depicting the arduous rehabilitation process that the two characters go through the film offers a piercing commentary on the Kurdish issue, war, and the crisis in masculinity.

One of the first things worth mentioning about the film Toss Up (Yazi Tura) (2004) is that it is an angry film; it is a film that does not hesitate to share its anger. Toss Up is a film that tells a story without hesitating to narrate this story dramatically, or even melodramatically. One gets the sense that the film shares the anger of its main characters without providing the spectator a distance or a respite. In fact, it is a film that weaves this anger and tension into its very mode of story telling. Curiously, Toss Up is not a film attracts and involves the spectator by offering surprises in the storyline or plot. Rather, like the film Solino (Fatih Akin, 2002), there is not mystery involved in the in the sense storyline whose purpose is to puzzle and thus attract the attention of the viewer. On the contrary, the film employs a style of filmmaking that allows the viewer to sense and foretell how the dramatic events will unravel before they happen. We know that Toss Up will have a sad ending (just like we know that Solino will have a sad ending); we can even guess what these endings are. This predictability does not take away from the film; rather it adds value by shifting the spectatorial attention to the aesthetic staging of the scenes and the intricacies of the dialogue in the film. After all, our relationship with the war in the Southeast region of Turkey mirrors the relationship that spectators develop vis-à-vis the film: we know how things will end and yet we know nothing of that end’s unraveling.

At times, we can even guess the dialogue and discern how the dialogue offers us the keys to the tragedy that will reveal itself at the end of each story. However, despite that every utterance in the film conveys a piece of that tragedy, Toss Up denies up the pleasure of the surprise. Everything is known and nothing is a surprise. With a Lars Von Trierien sense of fatalism, the film introduces the story as inevitable in a society and a country such as ours. As a result, a link is established between the segmented symbolism of the opening scene (a gun flying in the air, etc.) and the “tragedy” unraveling at the end of the film. It is the dialogue that hinges this link, which carries the weight of the film. If one were to excise any portion of the dialogue from the film, the whole itself might collapse. Again, everything is inevitably connected and the viewer knows everything. It is here that the dialogue exchanged between Ridvan, one of the main characters, and his friends in the film Firuz and Sencer becomes legible. After hearing from Ridvan the war traumas that he had gone through, Firuz and Sencer exclaim, “ Do you reckon the things he says are true? The fellow has lost it. I know the girl he is talking about is still alive but there is a truth-value to what he says too. Devran was involved with terror….” Firuz and Sencer know everything too. And the story Ridvan tells, whether it actually happened or not, whether it is real or not, somehow it touches them. Whether it exists or whether it is merely a ghost haunting Ridvan, it touches Firuz and Sencer. It touches us all.

Cast: Bahri Beyat, Engin Günaydın, Erkan Can, Kenan İmirzalıoğlu, Olgun Şimşek, Settar Tanrıöğen, Teoman Kubaracıbaşı.





No password needed.
Join "rar" files with "7zip" (freeware), or "WinRAR".
Join "001" numbered files with "HJ-Split" (freeware).
Verify downloaded files with "Quick.SFV" (freeware).