Umut

Morning comes to the cab district, a street post is turned off, stands lay out their wares, the driver (Yilmaz Güney) awakens as the curb-washing truck crosses the screen from background to foreground. "He works hard but earns nothing," his taxi is a rickety cart pulled by an emaciated horse. At home the wife (Gülsen Alniaçik) curses the day she got married, the children spend their time riding bicycles in a construction site and getting swatted for their trouble. Local workers rally for their rights, the protagonist contributes a flag and stays behind with doomed schemes: Lottery tickets, crime (fleetingly and unsuccessfully), the search for hidden riches. Blame falls on him when a wealthy motorist crashes into his carriage ("By leaving your cart alone, you attacked him," declares the police chief), the lifeless equine is dumped onto the rocky flatland in a long-shot memory of The Grapes of Wrath. The chum (Tuncel Kurtiz) who dreams of becoming a pasha, the revolver with no bullets, the beefy foreigner who wanders in whistling "Oh, Susanna" and handily foils their robbery with a couple of blows. Güney and Serif Gören jiggle their ethnographic scenario with eccentric angles curiously anticipatory of Killer of Sheep—the camera peeps into a well-fed businessman's crystal bauble as the driver pleads for work, later it becomes a pickpocket's hand and gets slapped accordingly. "You don't find treasure by praying!" Gold buried between two bridges, assures the old healer (Osman Alyanak), the journey into the desert, with its burning silhouettes and deepening craters, unleashes the surrealism beneath the crumby realistic surfaces. (Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a marked point of reference, serpent and all.) Güney's angry irony leaves the hero dwarfed and sightless at the close, spinning until the titular hope is indistinguishable from madness. With Kürsat Alniaçik, Enver Dönmez, Lüftü Engin, and Sema Engin. In black and white.