Cam Sehpa (The Turkish Coffee Table) (2025)
Caye Casas’ Spanish La mesita del comedor (The Coffee Table) is one of those films you can only cautiously recommend to people – even describing the premise is liable to be triggering and once that’s out of the way you have to get past the way it takes the worst imaginable real life horror and uses it as the spur for farcical black comedy. It’s also not exactly the sort of thing you’d often want to revisit … so it seems an unlikely candidate for remaking since it’s not possible, as it was with the redo of Speak No Evil, to soften the approach or offer a new, redemptive ending.
Can Evrenol, of Baskin and Housewife, doesn’t quite do a word-for-word, scene-for-scene remake … but does stick pretty closely to Casas’ script for 90% of the picture, which perhaps suggests a lot of parallels between Spanish and Turkish bourgeois culture (though I’d not bet against groteurs around the world delivering The Belgian Coffee Table, The Korean Coffee Table or The Namibian Coffee Table with equal conviction – and we’re counting down to the ultimate in please-god-no cinema, A Serbian Coffee Table). New parents Ibrahim (Alper Kul) and Zehra (Algi Eke) argue in front of a saleslady about a (hideous) coffee table – a plane of ‘unbreakable’ glass supported on two shiny horsies – which Ibrahim wants to buy. He is mainly concerned with getting his own way about just one thing in the apartment, where every other decision has been made by Zehra – who even got to choose the baby’s name and shut Ibrahim out from other key choices about their life. When he gets the bulky package home and assembles it, a crucial screw is missing … and that bane of UK public information films of the 1970s a carpet on a polished floor leads to an appalling mishap which breaks Ibrahim’s mind and pushes him into a series of lies and evasions as the family get through a meal with Ibrahim’s brother (Ozgur Emre Yildirim) and his girlfriend (Ece Su Uckan) while other complications – including a stalkery teenage girl (Elif Sevinc) from downstairs) – make the situation worse.
Casas presented an ultimate horror with some visual tact – Evrenol goes the other way, which will either make this too horrible for folk who could get through the Spanish film to endure or significantly mutes the effect since your this-isn’t-real response kicks in whenever special effects are deployed. There are some new wrinkles and a streamlined third act – when Ibrahim goes meta and whines ‘I want this film to be over!’ Evrenol responds with due haste. This is likely to be divisive, but Evrenol is a significant filmmaker. Baskin and Housewife both feature incursions of grotesque chaos into the world and run to extreme imagery and cosmic horror. The Turkish Coffee Table is more grounded, if just as horrific, but also runs to acutely-observed, brilliantly-played domestic character drama – possibly the most shattering element of the film is Zehra’s gleeful mirth at the breaking of ‘unbreakable’ glass and the way her unsuppressed glee at her husband being made to look an idiot scrapes nerves because he (and we) know something she doesn’t.
Discussion
No comments yet.