This is an amazing film in terms of well thought pictures, humorous details, and dream-reality mixture of its content. I laughed a lot! The story is of a Greek family having to leave Istanbul in 1960s, and the little son longing for his girlfriend and Istanbul. It is based on the displacement of characters and their way of finding identity through cooking. Spices in cooking are very important because they have the power to affect relationships between people who cook and eat the food. The film is arranged into three parts: appetizers-the part the little boy is in Istanbul, main course-the migration to Greece, and desserts-the boy became a lecturer and returns to Istanbul to find his grandfather on his death bed. Since most of the film is a fantasy world full of symbolic details, I wasn't sure if the historical details were distorted to emphasize the sentimentality. For example, you see a royal sign at the back of the immigration officers in Istanbul in 1960s. But then Turkey is a republic! There is no record of Greeks deported in those years, escorted by soldiers (neither in official history books, nor in unofficial histories, novels...). But this theme gives the film its sentimentality, so I assumed it was a filmic tool of the director's. I loved the scenes of the city and the camera views capturing the intimacy of interiors, although the image of Istanbul is given from a male foreigner point of view, with Orientalist features (dancing female figure, mosques, spice bazaar with no indication of modern metropolis)and preference of the old name of the city, 'Constantinopolis', instead of its name since 1923, 'Istanbul'.
Review of A Touch of Spice
