Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster

Ayşe, Ali, Mehmet and Zeynep are middle-class millennials struggling to make ends meet in Istanbul. Either still living with their parents or hardly getting by without help from their families, they are all beset by similar woes: money crunch, joblessness, social isolation. In view of the world’s horrors that Zeynep enumerates in her diary entries, these are minor problems, ‘slight disasters’, but they are all-consuming, at least to the extent of making them cry in the still of the night. However, Umut Subasi’s first feature, Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster, is not a melodrama. With an appealingly light touch, it diagnoses the malaise of a generation that has run up against a dead end, one whose future prospects are indistinguishable from a game of chance. This is a world where astrology, the lottery and online personality tests compete with visa and job applications as life-shaping elements. Fittingly, the film is structured around chance and coincidence, with its handful of characters encountering each other in every permutation, as though there were no world outside this small social bubble. With self-aware, frontal framing that pins characters to their surroundings and a counterintuitive musical score that turns pathos into humour, Subasi offers a social-media movie without social media, one whose characters are united in their double lives and frustrated desires. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)