AlexDeleon

The final film of the day was a most off-beat and slightly off-the-wall Swiss-French feature entitled "1 Journée" (One Day) by Swıss-French-English director Jacob Berger, with the director in attendance to field audience questions. Although the action of this film is compressed into a single 24 hour period a lot more happens here than in Zeynep's eight days mentioned earlier, in fact, so much happens that there is nearly enough material for two films. 
The compressed synopsis is this: Serge, a stud with an amazing growth of five o'clock shadow works as a radio announcer in Geneva, has a pretty blonde wife and an incredibly beautiful brunette mistress. On the way back home from a tryst with the mistress at fıve AM he hits somebody on the darkened road but mysteriously can't locate the victim. This preys on his mind and he finally turns himself in to the police. Meanwhıle pretty blonde wife, having detected his egregious philandering, decides to abandon both Serge and their ten or eleven year old son.
The boy who is wise far beyond his years  is passionately in love with a girl in his class at school, who happens to be the daughter of the incredibly beautiful mistress.  This leads to incredible complications when the incredibly beautiful mistress (Mathilde) takes the incredibly precocious lad, Vlad, in, after his mother throws his bedding out of the window of their streamlined sterile glass high-rise, splits the scene and is about to run off to L.A. with a Japanese Zombie... However, Mathilde after a borderline sexual encounter with young Vlad finally realizes that his wayward father isn't worth any more of her time and maybe she doesn't really want to wreck the kid's home anyway -- meanwhile  the wife has second thoughts and comes back to the high-rise, where in a scene with Antonionistic echoes she reconnects with her estranged family and maybe they're all gonna live alienatedly ever after.  I hope I find out in Part Two.  This semi-surrealistic film is not quite as weird as it sounds and has some incredibly interesting things in it, and the incredibly beautiful mistress is actress Noémie Kocher, who also collaborated on the scenario and is such a knockout that she alone is worth the price of admission.  This thought provoking film has already travelled far and wide -- from the super wide outdoor screen in Locarno to Pusan, South Korea, and is next headed for Moscow. I may have some more to say about it when the thoughts it has provoked settle, but there is no question that Jacob Berger's "1 Journée" is one helluva trip.
 
Alex, thinking it over in İstanbul