France / Germany and Turkey co-production, working with a highly technical team from Turkey My Favorite Fabric / Favorite Fabric war conditions in a young girl’s surreal inner world in a way trying to portray. In the film, director Gaya Jiji, who plays Nahla’s savvy co-worker, comes up with a story that is stuck between dreams and facts, with little or no exit.
The events that broke out in Syria and stretched towards the civil war in 2011, the film does not fully reflect the inner world of Nahla, and the film experiences something going on in the air. In fact, the director criticizes a woman’s feelings and interferes with her life by imprisoning her with a man’s dream.
The film is said to have been inspired by the director’s important films Belle de Jour, but we see that sexual taboos have been destroyed, but only dreams come down here. As I said, it is a film which starts with good intentions, but there is an incomprehensible bunch of contradictions in front of us because it cannot be fully surrounded!
It is also difficult to understand why the director used the civil war fund. Because she wants to create a world of women stuck in this environment, but because she does it only through Nahla, the background in the background is devastated. The fact that he couldn’t find the peace he couldn’t find in his own home or the explosion he couldn’t make in his appointment house at the top floor doesn’t really fit in. The confronted male world is not complicated but very clear! Samir, who came to marry Nahla, but then decided on his brother, prefers safe waters, while the soldier coming up disappears in the world of bodies offered to him.
In this case, Nahla’s depression is insufficient. Is Nahla in pursuit of her husband’s candidate, who doesn’t prefer her, or her dreams? Unless they sit, it becomes impossible to understand Nahla. Nahla’s youngest sister is more sensitive to the atmosphere in the country, at least sufficiently clear to react directly! Samir’s preferred middle brother Myriam is also in a passive silence.
Of course, the tension and lovelessness between the brothers draw attention. We can attribute this to the lack of the father figure, in fact, it would not be wrong to look for a father figure under all these behaviors of Nahla, the state of searching for the father who is not in the middle… But the film does not point to this. After a while, it bothers us to be confronted with a dreamed Nahla.
Screened at the Certain Glance section of the Cannes Film Festival, the film draws down Nahla’s world and hopes and condemns her to a fate surrounded by imagination, while trying to say something provocative about the world of women! That’s what I see!
My Favorite Fabric (2019)
Directed by: Gaya Jiji
Starring: Manal Issa, Gaya Jiji, Metin Akdülger, Ula Tabari, Saad Lostan, Wissam Fares, Mariah Tannoury, Souraya Baghdadi, Nathalie Issa, Hala Sayasne, Amani Ibrahim, Rand Raslan
Screenplay by: Gaya Jiji
Production Design by: Nadide Argun, Nadide Argun
Cinematography by: Antoine Héberlé
Costume Design by: Zehra Tuba Atac
Set Decoration by: Serdar Yılmaz
Makeup Design by: Tamay Karaloğlu, Janina Kuhlmann
Music by: Peer Kleinschmidt
Distributed by: Sophie Dulac Distribution (France)
Release Date: May 11, 2018 (Cannes Film Festival)
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