After he won the critic’s prize in the Horizonti section of the Venice festival, European critics went so far as to compare the Turkish filmmaker Mahmut Fazi Coskun with the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki, the Swede Roy Andersson and even the Coen brothers in terms of style and somewhat deadpan humor. These comparisons are still too difficult and unfounded, because “Annons” or “The Announcement” is still a significantly weaker film than most of what the above-mentioned authors have shot, and it is a bit of a bizarre mysterious black comedy shot in a noir style, in which we actually understand quite late during the film What’s this all about.
And for more than half of the film, it is not clear to us who these people are and what they are even planning. It is clear to us that the action takes place sometime during the sixties of the last century, and the story of several officers in the Turkish army who were apparently kicked out of the army is slowly being revealed. However, as Turkey is one of the countries known for countless successful and not so successful coups that were carried out by the army, even after a while we sense what they are trying to do. Also, very quickly when we understand this, it becomes clear to us that this is one of those attempted coups that can hardly succeed and that the main plan of these dismissed officers is to reach a radio station in Istanbul in order to read the announcement that it is taking place in Ankara. military coup.
Coskun was inspired by the actual attempted coup d’état in 1963, which ended unsuccessfully, as inspiration for this bizarre slow-motion black humor drama. In his film, Coskun imagines what it could have looked like and what went wrong, and although the idea itself and the style were more than interesting, the quality of the film was completely deadened by the slow pace and sense of confusion until the very end. All the same, “Anons” stands out with its exceptional production design and the time in which the action is shown, and it’s a real shame that something more could not be extracted from this interesting story.