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Boldly disregarding the rules of those screenwriting manuals which insist that a film needs an active, sympathetic protagonist, writer/director Zeki Demirkubuz's Fate has as its anti-hero an individual Musa (Serdar Orcin) who is impassively indifferent to society's expectations. The first in the filmmaker's Tales Of Darkness trilogy, Fate relocates Camus' The Outsider to contemporary Istanbul and and results in a scrupulously controlled drama, made more palatable by its vein of black humour.

Demirkubuz soon establishes the shipping clerk Musa's singular nature, in examining the latter's lack of emotional response to the death of his elderly mother, with whom he shares a flat. He displays no visible signs of distress or mourning, attending work with her corpse still in the bedroom. Fate will now dictate his life: he marries a female colleague (Zeynep Tokus) he doesn't even love, and later refuses to defend himself against charges of murdering his boss' wife. Even a lengthy custodial sentence doesn't alter his conviction, "I don't believe in anything."

"RELIANT ON UNDERPLAYED PERFORMANCES"

Long before the film gets to an actual penitentiary and a key conversation between the warden and Musa, Demirkubuz establishes a powerful sense of imprisonment, with shots of doors, windows, and rooms that appear to confine the characters. Photographed in long and often static takes, and reliant on underplayed performances and a sparing use of Mahler, Fate is an exacting work. Yet there's humour in the bleakness - "You're just like hero of a French novel I read" is how somebody describes Musa - and the mysterious ending holds out the possibility of an unlikely salvation.

In Turkish with English subtitles.