A young man who packages pirated DVDs for shady characters comes across a revolver next to which lies a picture of a woman. This discovery leads him to a couple that lives in the same grim area as him on the edge of Istanbul and is in a state of crisis. She is a seamstress, he is a butcher. There emerges a peculiar configuration of three people, who all find their despair hard to bear – all on their own.
Lost souls. Lost in space. The protagonists seem lost in the bleak urban landscape of desolate arterial roads, rubble and distant high-rises. They also seem lost in their everyday lives, which are defined by speechlessness and imminent unemployment. Grayness and drabness. Although there is a minimal plot around a contract murder, Pus is mainly a study of the state of total alienation, loneliness, emptiness and hopelessness. None of the three manages to find an expression for these feelings; yet the film gives them a form and each image speaks about them. Slow, highly stylized and elliptically narrated, with spare dialogues and no psychology – a European auteur film from Turkey.
Birgit Kohler
Production: Zuzi Film, Istanbul
Coproduction: Graal S.A., Athens
Screenplay: Tayfun Pirselimoğlu
Camera: Ercan Ozkan
Cast: Ruhi Sarı, Mehmet Avcı, Nurcan Eren
Format: 35mm (filmed on Video), color
Running time: 109 min.
Language: Turkish
