17/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Çağla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti deliver a punchy and audacious huis clos about the condition of women in Turkey

“I know you’re not who you pretend to be.” It’s under the sign of duplicity as an instrument of male domination and forced refuge for women that Turkish director Çağla Zencirci and French filmmaker Guillaume Giovanetti have placed Confidante [+see also:
interview: Cağla Zencirci & Guillaume …
film profile], their 3rd feature as a duo, which has made a scathing irruption in the Panorama section of the 75th Berlinale. It is fair to say straight away that it is impossible for this film to leave anyone indifferent, much like these lyrics from the song Douce by Clara Ysé that close the film: “if you knew the hatred that flows in my veins, you’d be afraid.”

The two filmmakers, who already got very much noticed with Noor [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2012 Cannes ACID) and Sibel [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Çağla Zencirci and Guillaum…
film profile] (in competition in Locarno in 2018), have indeed taken many risks, as much in the radioactive topic of their plot, centred on a woman working in an erotic call centre (and facing the threats of male despotism spreading throughout Turkish society) as in their style, since the entire film takes place in one closed location and essentially unfolds through phone conversations (a sort of The Guilty [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gustav Möller
film profile] in another register).

“You’ve ruined my plans. You’ll suffer the consequences.” In Ankara, the life of Arzu, real name Sabiha (the exceptional Saadet Işıl Aksoy on whose shoulders the entire film rests) is already very difficult when an earthquake on 17 August 1999 sends her into a dangerous spiral. Separated, the 40-year-old woman is fighting to gain custody of her son and, to survive economically, has anonymously found a job in an erotic call centre where she serves as a receptacle for all imaginable sexual misery. But Arzu has guts and, together with her colleagues, she doesn’t let it get to her. She also writes down the calls on a little notebook, since the customers are often the same. When the seismic catastrophe falls on Istanbul and a teenager buried under the rubble at the other end of the line begs her to save him, she knows what to do since a previous call revealed that Ankara’s prosecutor (who must give the green light to the rescue team) is taking part in an orgy in a big hotel. Despite the ambient fear of the powerful (“don’t tell me anything, don’t tell anyone”) and close and interested surveillance from the boss of the call centre (“he’s acting like a real pimp”), Arzu acts and calls, which will trigger a chain of events and put her life in the balance…

Intense, uncompromising and claustrophobic, on the verge of nightmarish, the film vacillates between a stifling, brutal realism and an implicit symbolic distance (one of the key characters is in fact writing a screenplay). Playing with the motif of the double, the filmmakers denounce head on male hypocrisy, violence hiding behind masks, the corruption of the elite, the toxic contamination of younger generations (“she’ll be scared of men her whole life and I’ll wonder if my son would do the same”) and the general climate (fear, servitude, guilty secrets, “the worst thing is to forget there’s another human being in front of you”). It’s sometimes a lot for one film, and one so tight (76 min), but the finale is earned, making for a reckless work carried by a modern heroine who knows that “fleeing doesn’t make anyone happy” and that “even alone, the female character can become herself”.

Confidante was produced by II Films (Turkey), 3B Productions (France), Les Films du Tambour (France) and Bidibul Productions (Luxembourg). Pyramide International handles international sales.

(Translated from French)