Acknowledging Albert Camus's "The Outsider" as its source-text, YAZGI (FATE) offers a bleak vision of contemporary Turkey. The film contains several of the stylistic devices associated with director Zeki Demirkubuz's earlier work: the extended use of fade-to-black shots, the complex shot-composition in which darkness at the left and right of the frame is broken up by shafts of light; and the extended close-up focusing on the characters' expressionless faces. Through such strategies he conjures up a world of unremitting hopelessness in which darkness and light act as metaphors for the characters' psychology. Their lives are mostly dark interspersed with occasional, if somewhat fleeting, shafts of hope.
Such optimistic moments are few and far between in a film that concentrates on Musa's (Serdar Orçin's) disillusion at a world that seems ever more indifferent to his state of mind. The film begins with his mother's death: unable to reconcile himself to such a shattering occurrence, he does not tell anyone about it until at least a day afterwards. But then perhaps he is right to do this: the office where he works is chock-full of glass partitions acting as a permanent barrier to communication. Musa's boss Naim (Demir Karahan) is wrapped up in his extra-marital affairs; his colleague Yavuz (Feridun Koç) shuns conversation in favor of his computer- screen; while secretary Sinem (Zeynep Tokuş) is another lost soul looking for an emotional port in a storm. In such an environment, it's hardly surprising that Musa should retreat into himself by refusing to reveal anything about his emotions.
Musa's emotional state is summed up through a series of potent visuals. He stands at the side of a busy road, watching cars and lorries whiz past him, suggesting detachment from life. His apartment-block is dull and dingy, with metal bars across the windows denoting mental as well as physical imprisonment. As he walks into the block, the sound of slamming doors suggest a reluctance on anyone's part to engage in conversation.
In the end Musa is tried for murder; as it turns out, this is something he did not commit. Nonetheless he serves a prison sentence for it until released on a free pardon. In a climactic sequence comprised of shot/reverse shot sequences, he debates with a lawyer the pros and cons of the prison sentence, revealing as he does so a continuing reluctance to engage with the world around him at an emotional and spiritual level. The deity means nothing to him; and hence he appears to have no morality. The film ends with a voice-over in which Musa discovers the true consequences of his detachment, that prove far more profound than he anticipated.
YAZGI is quite difficult to watch, with long continuous sequences in which director Demirkubuz's camera seldom seems to move as it focuses intently on the characters' expressions. Sometimes he uses the shot/reverse-shot structure, a directorial mode that normally suggests some kind of logical conversation, but in this film our expectations are consciously frustrated. This is an illogical world, and Musa knows it. Demirkubuz uses certain shot-structures to emphasize this fact.
