Devotion

“I love a city that greets you with flowers.” So opens Devotion, in an appropriately beautiful overture to the first of what would become many projects undertaken by Cynthia Madansky in Turkey and its grand, palimpsestic Istanbul. It’s also a bittersweet paean, given the film’s themes of romantic rupture and isolation. At once a breakup film, an experiment with narrative, and a reflection on a nation in transition, the film is structured as a drift through the city by way of nights passed in various hotel rooms. In Madansky’s hands, these transitory non-places become a means to reflect on shifting states of selfhood, of xcoupledom, of statehood.

Throughout one can locate shades of Chris Marker’s curious eye, of Marguerite Duras’ interplay between image and text, and of Chantal Akerman’s own desolate, evocative hotel rooms, the film is nevertheless distinctly Madansky’s, reflecting the artist’s ongoing interrogation of belonging.

As the romantic connection at the film’s core that continues to fray, Madansky incorporates and sets it against the practice of religious devoutness on an individual and social scale, in a moment in which the nation was negotiating such questions. “Istanbul, a secular city challenged by Islam,” the voiceover muses. “Istanbul, a Muslim city challenged by secularism.”

Though relatively minimal in formal terms—with a toned and measured aesthetic sensibility, effortlessly capturing and assembling minor but profound details—the film further builds out worlds and narrative through the deceptively rich use of sound and voice. The result is a portrait of a place that employs both the speculative and spectral to feel both ambulatory and grounded.