The Announcement (Turkey/Bulgaria, 2018)

Art house film lovers can sit back and thoroughly savor every nuance of this meticulously executed movie that doesn’t fit into a single genre but draws from several. It opens with film noir’s suspense and mystery but soon fleshes out to theater of the absurd, existentialism, satire, and at times, the sense of dystopia. This mixed offering works seamlessly and ingeniously from start to finish, coming from the hand of an obvious master, Mahmut Fazil Coşkun.

There is much nighttime driving in this movie, much standing and sitting around waiting, much silence and guarded watching, while the clock ticks and the central characters—military officers—cogitate on the time running out for their attempted coup in a fictionalized Turkey in 1963. The period props are marvelous—cars, phones, offices, radio equipment, and a hospital. It’s 1963, but we’re in some retro world that’s so long gone, so technologically archaic, that we can’t remember having lived in such a world ourselves.

The middle-aged characters carrying out the coup—Reha (Ali Seçkiner Alici) Şinasi (Tarhan Karagöz, Kemal (Murat Kiliç), and Rifat (Şencan Güleryüz)—are stuck in an unending nightmare. They go from one dead end to the next, in their effort to announce from Istanbul Radio that their coup has been a success and the country is now in better, safer hands. This single night of one detour after another in the officers’ mission never alters their deadpan faces, while outlandish or absurd incidents keep occurring, such as two cold-blooded killings and finding an unexpected use for the latest Frigidaire model that one of the officers is hoping to market on the side. The audience is kept in suspense despite the deliberately humdrum pace of the story. Other details and scenes have acute humor, such as the blasé attitude of the local citizens toward the coup. When called upon to help the perpetrators in their thwarted mission, the locals comply willingly, indifferent to who or what they’re helping. Coups are just an everyday event in their lives with no personally threatening impact. The citizens just want to be helpful.

As things escalate in their low-key, non-happening way, Radio Ankara begins to make broadcasts, while the coup plotters drive around in a bakery van trying to resolve their technical problems with Radio Istanbul. The officers maintain their same deadpan faces as they listen to their mission beginning to fail from the Ankara position. Nothing can faze these guys. Are the people in this movie inured to the political superstructure overarching their lives but never really affecting them? This viewpoint is another of the movie’s ironies, and possibly a statement on contemporary Turkey. 

The Announcement comes full circle by the end of the film, with an image of the uniformed protagonists, back to ordinary life, as if their grand plan was nothing in particular—just a bit of hopeful excitement for a change, a perk for their deadened egos—but now regular, mundane existence resumes.

Watch for screenings of The Announcement at 2019–2020 film festivals and in art house theaters.