In her fifth feature film, Turkish director Pelin Esmer adopts a self-reflexive approach to storytelling. While the attempt is admirable and occasionally intriguing, And the Rest Will Follow lacks the conceptual rigor necessary to organize her Matryoshka dolls into a meaningful formation. A viewer will detect elements of Hong Sang-soo’s gamesmanship in Esmer’s film, but there’s a self-defeating, po-faced tone throughout the film, as if the filmmaker had received an assignment that she mostly wanted to ignore. The action takes place in the town of Söke, on the Aegean coast, in the midst of its second annual film festival. The cinema is conveniently located on the bottom floor of the town’s biggest hotel, and a housekeeper named Aliye (Merve Asya Özgür), inspired by the presence of a favorite filmmaker, takes us through her own personal story, implicitly presenting it as a counterpoint to the Turkish cinema she loves. In other words, Aliye uses the framework of art cinema to articulate her own frustrations and desires.
Unfurling in parallel with Aliye’s story is that of a director named Levent (Timuçin Esen). He has been commissioned to make a short film by the festival, and we observe his creative process — the rehearsing and shooting of a Kiarostami-esque film about an introspective little boy (Oğuz Kara) — as he navigates the slow-paced social scene in Söke as well as the end of his marriage. Esmer offers a number of suggestions that Levent and Aliye will cross paths, that he will seize upon her story of deferred dreams, disappointment, and ill-fated love, bringing it to the screen. Interestingly, this never happens. Aliye reaches out to Levent, and her audio letter to him often serves to structure the narrative we’re watching. But, like the post-middle-aged barflies whose empty glasses Aliye clears away, Aliye finds herself unable to spin her existence into a dramatic arc.
Too theoretical to be a simple hang-out film, but too diffuse to function as a meditation on the creative process, And the Rest Will Follow promises much but delivers little. Esmer’s title, which Aliye speaks at both the start and the end of the film, is like a statement of purpose, a conviction that by simply allowing events to play out with little external shape, a meaningful whole will come into focus. And while And the Rest Will Follow is never boring, it also feels rambling and desultory, a series of warm-ups that never shift into action. One expects that the focus on filmmaking and narration will circle back on itself, displaying the active process by which personal anecdotes take shape into symbolic fiction. Instead, it feels as if Esmer is suggesting that Turkish cinema has hit a dead end, having lost the ability to tell any story, including its own.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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