Film review: ‘Kedi’

Cat fans will enjoy this full length feature at the Sebastiani|

One thing you learn quickly from the Istanbul-set cat documentary “Kedi” is that the Turks do not embrace spaying and neutering. Feral street felines are a symbol of the ancient city and the males are implacable and prolific, generating so many litters that five generations of cats might all be feeding together on a single dock.

Ceyda Torun directs her film with languorousness as a core value - her camera seizes many bewhiskered magic-hour moments intermixed with drone-captured cityscapes and cats-eye-view tracking shots winding through alleys a foot off the ground.

Generally speaking, the myriad Istanbul kitties are a good-looking bunch, often leaner and possessing more prominent cheekbones than their North American counterparts. The loveliest mouser might be Bengü, with his beautiful, Martian green eyes sliced by almond pupils, who hunts relentlessly for love and fish guts. A woman says the experience of knowing him is, “Like making friends with an alien.”

The film flows through many sequences of cats going about their business until they’re interrupted by serious men with serious mustaches saying serious things like, “I had a nervous breakdown, that’s when I got involved in cats,” or, “They rekindle our slowly dying joy for life.” The interviewees look like hard dudes but watch as they stop breathing when a kitten stops breathing.

To address an important question, “Kedi” features only one pair of true cat ladies, who have the requisite creepy puppet display in their abode and produce 20 pounds of food a day for the cats that hang around their place - some of them are half-wild and the rest are just outlaws. And these women are, somehow, less absurd than the man who strolls about the wharf with a syringe full of milk to squirt into the mouths of his many young dependents.

The film is told in vignettes, so none of the cats reappear after their sections except for a brief coda at the end. “Kedi” would have been more propulsive if the stories of the cats were interspersed and drawn out as narratives, but that would not have fit the tone of the film, in which audience and animal alike must always be ready for a catnap. The most humorous aspects of the film are the dietary proclivities of the felines - one refuses mackerel and only eats Bluefin, while an adorable deli cat paws and the window for turkey but eschews roast beef. None of these tabbies are, in the American sense, “good” pets (by which we generally mean well-behaved). The Turkish find comportment less relevant than having great character.

We meet one battler, Gamsiz, who makes small dogs cower in fear and shares a sensational, vogueing faceoff with another alpha male. Their stylish poses are pierced by ear-splitting yowls but their aggression is merely suggestive. And the pet owners of Istanbul aren’t concerned about this street violence anyway, because they feel indoor cats forget their inherent “catness” - the tomcat banditti have a freedom that is never compromised.

Despite the many attractive shots of fishmongers and quayside restaurants, one wishes for a more complete, cartographic picture of Istanbul. One speaker explains that some of the cats were Norwegian imports from the old days, but more could be made about how there got to be such a broad range of feral cats stalking the giant sewer rats of Constantinople.

At times the film meanders so long at dawn and dusk that it feels more like a screensaver than cinema, but there is an abiding gentleness to it all - even if this is just a movie to be used therapeutically, that might be reason enough to spend an afternoon with it.

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