‘What Remains’ Review: A Slow-Burn, Subtly Powerful Portrait of a Creative Couple in Turkey Coming Back From the Edge

The poetry of real life, and the poetry you jot down in notebooks or recite in your head, come clashing together in subtly powerful ways in What Remains (Artakalan), the latest feature from veteran Turkish filmmaker Yesim Ustaoglu (Clair Obscur).

Following a bohemian couple from Istanbul who hit a wall both creatively and personally, this slow-burn drama takes a little too much time to get the ball rolling but evolves into an honest portrait of artists finding their way out of the darkness. After premiering in competition at San Sebastian, it will continue its festival tour and likely book theaters around Europe, although it may be too minimalist for wide exposure.

What Remains

The Bottom Line A quiet drama with deep feelings.

Venues: San Sebastián Film Festival (Official Selection)
Cast: Oyku Karayel, Metin Akdulger, Ali Kayra Kul, Ilyas Salman
Director-screenwriter: Yesim Ustaoglu
2 hours 6 minutes

Told with a delicate but assured hand, the story begins with couple Elif (Okyu Karayel) and Mehmet (Metin Akdulger) raising their son, Selim (Ali Kayra Kul), in a comfy Istanbul flat filled with books, records, paintings, handmade toys and other signs of a rich intellectual life. And yet that life seems to have come to a halt for Elif, a respected poet who’s been stuck in a rut for a long time. Mehmet, meanwhile, looks like he’s having fun recording avant-garde tracks at night with his jam band, although he winds up getting laid off from his day job as a music teacher, leaving him without a steady income.

The couple is thus in the midst of an early midlife crisis when we first meet them, and things only seem to get worse as the days drag by. The early scenes in What Remains can be a bit trying, perhaps because they’re attempting to faithfully capture what it’s like to hit a dead end, which often happens to artists like Elif and Mehmet once they’ve settled down and tried to build a family, balancing their creative ambitions with the necessity of making a living. Things finally come to a head during one long, difficult scene in which the two see no other solution than to separate, even if they still seem to love each other.

The film then picks up both narratively and spiritually after Elif decides to hop in her car and hit the road toward parts unknown. She leaves Selim in the care of Mehmet, who continues on with the daily grind until he gets a call that his father, Mustafa (Ilyas Salman), is dying back in their hometown.

What started off as a story of two people reaching an impasse soon opens up into a road movie in which they both make journeys to their origins, staying apart while reconnecting with who they once were. In Mehmet’s case, this means confronting his father about a long-buried family tragedy, while for Elif it entails traveling to the remote cliffside village in central Turkey where her grandparents lived many years ago.

Ustaoglu makes the latter’s trip the centerpiece of a movie that slowly but surely reveals how such voyages can be a healing process for people disconnected from themselves and one another, especially when they’re trying to scrape by in a metropolis like Istanbul. For a poet like Elif, this means experiencing the great outdoors and the quiet beauties of her family’s native home, where things still seem to function like they did a hundred years ago.

Cinematographer Kiril Prodanov captures that beauty in graceful widescreen vistas, framing Elif against the snow-filled landscapes and soft natural light. Despite being a film centered around a poet and a musician, What Remain is less about the words they speak than the images that surround them, whether it’s the purity of the mountains to which Elif retreats or the decrepit apartment that brings back to life Mehmet’s memories as he takes care of his father during his final days. Sound also plays a part in that story, with Mehmet recording his father’s dying breaths for one of his experimental pieces.

Both Karayel and Akdulger are strong in roles that require them to portray deep turmoil without much dialogue or overt drama. This can make the movie frustrating for those seeking something more explosive, because the conflicts in What Remains mostly happen on the inside. And yet, it’s by going outside — out of the apartment, the city and the usual routine — that these two characters start healing themselves, finding a way to keep on living and working, moving ahead instead of staying in place.