returning home to face the truth
by
Douglas Messerli
Atakan
Yilmaz (screenwriter and director) Merhaba Anne, Benim, Lou Lou (Hi Mom, It's
Me, Lou Lou) / 2024 [20 minutes]
This
short film by Turkish filmmaker Atakan Yilmaz begins with its young hero, Hakki
(Onur Gözeten), performing in drag in a gay night club as Lou Lou, draped in
ropes of reflective glass beads, but still sporting his handsome moustache. He
is a sensation, featuring a fluorescent band of light upon his body as he dances.
This young university student survives by playing out his homosexuality in the
clubs, a reality which he has entirely hidden from his family—except as we
later learn, from his mother.
In Istanbul, he is fine, living out the
nights at the bar and with his best female friend, Pamuk (Eylül Dursun), who we
see in an early scene as they move off into the night by a taxi driver (the handsome,
hirsute director) who Hakki is convinced he peeking in the rearview mirror at
his female friend, but who might actually be just as interested in the
earringed Hakki, truly himself a sight to behold.
But at that very instant, Hakki finally
takes a call from his sister reporting to him of his mother’s death.
The rest of this film suddenly settles
down into the provincial world from which he has escaped, and his family’s
oppression. After 3 years absence this only male offspring must now face the responsibilities
his patriarchal society expects him to embrace.
Picked
up by his uncle, Hakki is driven immediately to the cemetery, told that he
father decided not to even wait for his son’s arrival for the funeral. And when
he finally visits the funeral party, still under way, an aunt declares his
mother died in grief over him.
One might not even imagine a more
horrible experience of a young man returning to mourn his own mother. And Hakki
cannot even participate in the traditional funeral burial activities, where
evidently he is supposed to enter the hole which has been dug for his mother’s
coffin, presumably accepting him into the space in which he stands.
Hakki becomes so traumatized that his
uncle finally pulls him out of the gravesite.
Showering after the event, he suddenly
perceives that his toenails are painted bright red, and attempts to remove the
coating, but a knock on the bathroom door interrupts his activities, and he is
forced to face the grieving family members.
His sister Emine (Yasemin Çonka) is not at
all amused by the requests, smoking a cigarette and adjuring her brother at the
same moment for wanting a cigarette and for smoking in the house. She is
clearly hostile, furious for his inability to simply pick up the phone and
answer her calls. “Mom spent days at looking at your pictures,” she informs him.
A cramp in his leg, a sock pulled away suddenly reveals his painted toenails,
of which he sister at first doesn’t even speak. “My girlfriend did it,” Hakki
insists, “It was just a joke.”
“She has a weird sense of humor,” his sister
responds.
Finally, after everyone has left, his uncle
advises him to pass the exams, suggesting that they will find a good job for
him. But even the sister whispers that perhaps it is better to stay at their
house. But Hakki claims he’s fine. They too also leave, and the outsider is
left alone with his father.
With a series of short, unfriendly
comments, he father finally retires.
On the phone with his female friend, Hakki
suddenly discovers a hand-knitted sweater in the gay-rainbow colors.
The next morning, with his father at the
breakfast table, his son appears in the sweater, explaining it was a gift of his
mother’s. And he explains that his mother had suddenly appeared in Istanbul one
day, visiting him. He went in the room, dressed in something like he is now,
and she started crying. He explains that he didn’t know what to do, now that
the truth was out. She told him everything was over, that his father was going
to kill him. “You wouldn’t. I knew you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do it because it
was the life God gave.”
His mother got up, kissed him, and said “You
are my child.”
“Did we do it Dad? Did we kill mom?”
He tells his father that he will return
to Istanbul that night, but all he asks is that he first take him to the cemetery.
In the last scene Lou Lou is again
dancing and singing, this time his traditionally dressed mother standing in the
crowd, smiling, encouraging him to be him/herself.
Given what we know of the world of such
religious patriarchy, it seems a bit unbelievable that Hakki’s father seems to
finally come to terms with his son’s sexuality through the embracement of his
only son by his wife, but we can only hope for such a resolution and this film’s
fiction allows that dream; and we can only devoutly wish it so.
Los
Angeles, July 16, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema (July 2026).
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