Good start, but then it gets ruined

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Araf begins with a shot of a giant pot on a train of what looks like sand tip over at a sluggish pace. At one point it becomes clear that it only seemed sand on the surface. In fact it is burning hot, orange glowing, molten metal that pours out of the pot.This pre title shot is a great idea for a beginning. One that is promising. It's like it tells you something about what you are about to see. But what I saw in the movie was only so interesting. The pot metaphor deserved a better movie.You get a peek into the lives of these characters but we don't see anything that is particularly surprising. For instance who doesn't know that a lot of people are longing for things out of their reach? Or that there is domestic violence? Or that there are unhappy marriages? What's the point of showing all these things?The miscarriage is a false note to me. It doesn't fit with the rest of the film because of the way the scene is filmed namely too shocking and uncomfortable. And the marriage in jail seems too much of a "fairytale" ending to me. I think it should have ended less brightly.But although it is far from a complete success as far as the script is concerned and I question the point of showing a lot of what the film shows, I do feel that it's a movie which has its heart in the right place and which a lot of the time does what it sets out to do rather well.

Set in the small town of Karabuk, midway between Istanbul and Ankara, ARAF (Limbo) explores the empty lives of two young people, both of whom work in a roadside restaurant. Olgun (Baris Hacihan) has a drunken father and a mother who becomes so frustrated that she eventually abandons the family; he loves Zehra (Neslihan Atagul) but cannot find words to express his feelings. The teenage Zehra is looking for a way out of her monotonous life; she believes she has found it when she has an affair with trucker Mahur (Ozcan Deniz), but this soon fizzles out, leaving her pregnant and alone. Too scared to tell her family about what has happened, she has the stillborn baby in the bathroom at the local clinic. Once Olgun finds out about what has happened to Zehra, he embarks on an orgy of violence that lands him in jail. Yesim Ustaoglu's film is similar in terms of subject-matter to Pelin Esmer's recent GOZETLEME KULESI (The Watchtower); both explore the lives of young women growing up in rural societies, with little prospect for their futures other than marriage. Too frightened to confess their real feelings in front of their (traditional) families, they are left isolated and doomed to suffer. Rather disappointingly, however, Ustaoglu does not explore her characters in any great depth; while she incorporates several lingering close-ups of Zehra and Olgun in profile, she does not tell us much about their relationship to those closest to them. While understanding the frequent silences - as the characters cannot find words to communicate with one another - the narrative tends to sag in places. At just over two hours, ARAF is perhaps half an hour too long; the story would have been equally effective if it had been recounted more concisely.

Araf/Somewhere in Between which won the Best Film prize in the 2012 Abu Dhabi Film Festival is an absorbing feature from Yesim Ustaoglu.Zehra and Olgun are waiters at a café in a service station. They live monotonous lives and are going nowhere. Olgun loves Zehra but is not able to express himself. Zehra is feeling suffocated in her house under her strict parents and is looking for a way out. To her it seems that Mahur, a truck driver offers the best chance of escape to a better life.There is a scene inside a ladies toilet involving Zehra which is reminiscent of Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and in my view director Yesim Ustaoglu goes a step too far. Overall though Araf offers assured direction and very good performances. It is yet another impressive film from the Turkish cinema.

In her 5th feature, Yesim Ustaoglu celebrates the ingenuity of approaching to the story of today. Remarkable observations on regular lives in a small town of Turkey leads a sudden empathy of viewer. In Karabuk, a town on the main road between two biggest cities of Turkey, Istanbul and Ankara, everyone and everything is passing by and that transience causes a strong gap between the present and the future, on its inhabitants. Specifiying this transition point trickily symbolize the zeitgeist of Turkey, stumbling between modern and traditional. In such atmosphere, characters feel the same stagnancy while dreaming about a sudden and easy way to slip through the net, and waiting for a miracle, whatever it's about-money, love or happiness. Such representation of today and -what I like most about Araf / Somewhere in Between is- its bold language, are the elements which make the movie extremely strong and success to make the audience feel being stuck, so an identification.