Destiny · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man waits. He has been told no, plainly and more than once, and still he waits — outside a door, on a street, in the heat of a Turkish summer that the film renders in bleached yellows and grays. This is Bekir, and the strange thing about Destiny is how little it does to dramatize him. Zeki Demirkubuz parks the camera and holds. It watches Bekir the way the dossier puts it — "as if from across a courtyard, interested but not intimate." No close-up leans in to find the romantic ache we expect. There isn't one. His love for Uğur is played, as the dossier says, like "dogged, almost bureaucratic persistence." That flatness is not a failure of feeling. It is the whole argument.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for cinema built on that kind of behavior: the impulse-image. Not the action-image, where a character sizes up a situation and acts to change it — Bekir changes nothing, and neither does Uğur, who pines for the jailed criminal Zagor while Bekir pines for her. The impulse-image runs underneath action. It is the cinema of drives that erupt beneath the social surface — appetite, compulsion, a pull the person cannot name. Deleuze called the world such drives belong to the originary world: a savage substratum that a realistic setting only seems to cover. Demirkubuz's lower-class Istanbul is exactly this derived milieu — cramped flats, dust, traffic noise, a television in the next room — a concrete place that turns out to be the surface of something older and blinder. The desire on screen "is indistinguishable from compulsion," and "neither character articulates what they want or why." That is the originary world showing through the apartment walls.

What makes it tragedy rather than mere squalor is the shape it takes: Deleuze's line of slope, the irreversible downward gradient toward exhaustion and death. Destiny does not escalate. It accumulates. The same one-sided loves repeat with small variations, and "each repetition confirms that nothing will change and no one will escape." The film's Turkish title, Kader, means fate — divine predestination — and the slope is how fate looks when you film it honestly: not a thunderbolt, just a man who keeps following, a woman who keeps vanishing, a descent with no floor. The behavior reads as symptom. We are given the act and denied the cause, which is Demirkubuz's formal way of insisting that people genuinely do not know why they do what they do.

None of this would land without the performance method, and here the lineage is precise. Demirkubuz takes Robert Bresson's "model" wholesale — the device of Pickpocket, where non-actors suppress expression until meaning has to accrue through action rather than displayed interiority. From late Bresson, L'Argent, he takes the engine itself: a protagonist destroyed by the inner necessity of his own character rather than by plot. Watch how the bodies are used. They sit, stand, pass through doorways; blocking stays "functional," never legible as directorial display. This is what Deleuze calls a cinema of the body — duration carried by ordinary posture — and each withholding stance becomes a gest, an attitude that exposes a relation the dialogue refuses to state. Bekir's waiting body says what Bekir will not.

The editing belongs to the same ethic. Demirkubuz cuts by duration, not by drama — the grammar of Jeanne Dielman, where every action gets equivalent screen time regardless of weight. A confrontation "does not end with the decisive line; it continues into the embarrassed or enraged or exhausted silence that follows." Deleuze's term is dead time, temps mort: the stretch where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held. The discomfort is functional. By denying us the rhythmic relief of a conventional cut, the film strands us in real time with people who have nowhere to go — and in those silences Bekir becomes less an agent than a seer, a watcher and endurer in a pure optical situation, looking at a life he can register but cannot act upon. This is precisely the crisis Deleuze located at the hinge of cinema's history: the crisis of the action-image, the moment a character can no longer respond adequately to what he perceives. Demirkubuz inherits a whole tradition of evacuated melodrama — Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends, Dreyer's Gertrud — that keeps melodrama's chassis while stripping out its emotional payouts, so that ruin registers as social inevitability rather than personal catharsis.

There is one more turn of the screw, and it is invisible from inside the film. Uğur also appears in Demirkubuz's earlier Innocent (1997); Destiny is its prequel. Anyone who knows the older film watches her walk toward a destination already fixed. The slope was sealed before the movie began. The title was never a theme. It was a spoiler.

What Demirkubuz did — his specific contribution — was to graft Bresson's European formal vocabulary onto the Turkish social-realist fatalism of Yılmaz Güney's Yol, replacing Güney's heat and expressionism with clinical patience. He proved you could film fate without poeticizing it, and that refusing beauty could be the most exacting kind of respect. To aestheticize this world, the dossier notes, would be to lie about it. Watch Destiny again knowing where Uğur is headed, and the camera's flat, courtyard distance stops feeling cold. It feels like grief that has learned not to perform.