The Announcement (Anons)

Directed by Mahmut Fazıl Coşkun (2017) ***

As comedies go, Anons is exceedingly dry and emotionally cold, appropriate for a story in which martinis and refrigerators are a part of the dialogue. So cool and detached is Turkish director Coşkun’s style that the film is a third of the way through before it becomes apparent that it is a comedy, and one of the most bleak and absurd kind at that. Samuel Beckett would have enjoyed this experiment in wicked humor and import (Harold Pinter also comes to mind).

Anons has as its origin story a failed Turkish military coup in 1963. The film proper begins in a taxi driving through the rainy, dark night. The talkative driver’s (Mehmet Yilmaz Ak) attempts at conversation aren’t reciprocated by his somber and private customers, Sinasi (Tarhan Karagoz) and Reha (Ali Seckiner Alici). After being stopped at a police checkpoint, the ruthlessness of the passengers is revealed, as well as a glimpse of their mission: to converge with two other conspirators, Nazif (Nazmi Kirik) and Kemal (Murat Kilic), make their way to an Istanbul radio station, and broadcast an announcement timed to coincide with a similar one in capital city Ankara.

The Announcement has scenes of cold-blooded violence, sudden and unpreventable, as much violence is. Even so, Coşkun appears to relish the sad and subtle fun to be had poking at the pretensions of power and authoritarianism. Time and again, the group’s high-minded plans and directives are brought low, stalled or stymied by seemingly insignificant things no regime change could have planned for; the station director who doesn’t know how to use the equipment, the time wasted with a talkative neighbor, a misremembered name, an unhelpful nurse. In short, the group of joyless, taciturn bureaucrats find their serious mission at odds with the ambiguities, oddities and complexities of everyday life.

Using static, stationary “real-time” camera shots which emphasize awkward, silent pauses, Coşkun seems to be channeling Andrei Tarkovsky by way of the Coen brothers. The Announcement requires a sympathetic frame of mind from the viewer, which is slowly and patiently, if modestly, rewarded.

The early ’60s coup The Announcement references was one of three at the time, one of them successful. Coincidentally, while The Announcement was in production in 2016, another attempted military coup transpired in Turkey (three hundred people were killed in this chaotic event). This most recent coup pertinently failed for similar reasons as Coşkun’s farce: lack of coordination, lack of timing and lack of media control. The absurd is hard to escape.

—Michael R. Neno, 2022 Mar 8