Nermin Yusr
“If you tell the audience that there is a bomb underneath the table and it will explode in five minutes, you will leave them in suspense for five minutes, but if the bomb explodes suddenly without prior warning, they will be surprised for five seconds.”
That was a quote by the genius director Alfred Hitchcock about how to produce suspense and surprise in cinematic films. This saying comes to my mind whenever I watch some work deliver a scene either by using the idea of the bomb under the table or the bomb that goes off immediately and throwing the suspense away; this does not apply to the dark family drama “Terzi” which tried to humbly adapt from Daniel Day-Lewis’ Phantom Thread.
Peyami is a world-class fashion designer who adores his dresses, each of which tells a story he experienced in his busy life. He has an assistant called Suzi, who absorbs his repeated tantrums, and a frivolous playboy friend from a wealthy family called Dimitri. Peyami learns of the death of his grandfather, so he returns to his hometown to continue his work from there; Peyami’s family consists of his grandmother Sülün and his father, Mustafa, who suffers from an intellectual disability; as for where his mother fits in the plot remains a big question in terms of her absence without revealing the story of her marriage. In the midst of these events, Dimitri asks his friend Peyami to sew a wedding dress for his fiancée, the fiancée who was abused and locked in the closet for hours by him, which made her run away from him, where she ends up by accident in Peyami’s house to work in the care of his father Mustafa, who is mentally handicapped. Since Peyami and Dimitri’s families are close, I expected that she would be caught right away, but that did not happen for many of the following episodes, which focused on the relationship that sparked between Peyami and his friend’s fiancée in a Turkish drama that is no different from Forbidden Love, Hob Mouharram, or many others forbidden love series.
When you watch the series on Netflix, you will see on the side of the screen a disclaimer about the content of the episode that was titled “Discrimination,” and you will immediately think that you are about to watch content or dialogue that is intentionally discriminatory to prove an objective point, such as works that talk about racism or forms of oppression. But that episode presents a very stereotypical picture showing how people with autism are bullied and pushed away from society instead of making them feel included. However, despite the tireless efforts of Olgun Şimşek, who played Mustafa, to play the disabled guy, as they call him, I believe it is better to leave these roles to actors with autism.