
“In Your Dreams” is a shiny but drab Turkish romantic fantasy about two people who “dream” they wake up married, have a child and lives together, and spend much of their time together trying to figure out how this mystery happened to them.
Of course, this being a screen romance, what wedding planner not-planning-on-marrying-soon Pelin (Burcu Özberk) and playboy developer Engin (Murat Boz) are really doing is slowly falling in love with the idea of being in love and married. Very slowly, it turns out.
Pelin spends much of the film’s first act talking her marriage-mad sister Merve (Hivda Zizan Alp) into the idea that her mania is misguided, that she’s got “time” to find Mr. Right, and that her calculations — that these two over-scheduled wedding planners have about “2:41” each day to devote to finding a mate — are wrong.
Rich, over-dressed Lexus-loving Engin is busy knocking down traditional neighborhoods in the same of “progress,” and convincing his best mate Cihan (Ugur Uzunel) that marriage is “the biggest con job” of them all.
He’s got a rule, and any woman who asks “the forbidden question” (“Where is this relationship going?”) is sure to get her walking papers.
Events conspire to toss them together in a specific two minute and 41 second time frame at a restaurant where the ladies’ man shows off his acumen in the kitchen, and next thing we and they know, these two lovely creatures wake up in bed together.
But “nothing happened,” not that they remember, anyway. And well, this is a Turkish film. Sexy outfits and bare chests are about as far as things go on Asia Minor.
They try to figure out what happened, confirming their marital status with relatives (“TWO YEARS?”), pondering a scar that indicates he had some sort of accident, consulting a therapist, insulting each other (“We’re married? In your dreams!”), eventually finding her diary which allows them to try and recreate their first meeting, first date, first kiss, etc.
Every time they think they might be getting somewhere, night falls. Waking up nine months pregnant is one consequence of that. Child-rearing is another.
The object of this three-writer screenplay is to show each how life is passing them by without finding love, a mate, a family and all the happiness that brings.
As a sidebar, Engin is supposed to start feeling guilty about all the romantic, sentimental neighborhoods he’s pulvering in the name of “progress.”
But there are no real emotional highs or lows in this story, and tender moments here just don’t play.
Our stars underscore the made-for-Amazon Prime or Netflix Turkish model of casting TV stars/singers as the leads, but as lovely as they both are, there’s little in their performances that makes us buy into the budding romance or invest in their story.
The superficialities are all spotless — Istanbul sights, a Bosphorus ferry, tony clubs and restaurants, Lexus product placement. But “In Your Dreams” is so empty as to be instantly forgettable, like a dream that isn’t all that, a love affair you can barely recall and a movie you won’t remember a week after you’ve seen it.
Rating: TV 16 and up (but quite chaste)
Cast: Burcu Özberk, Murat Boz, Hivda Zizan Alp, Ugur Uzunel and Ekin Mert Daymaz
Credits: Directed by Cemal Alpan, scripted by Ferhat Ergün, Serhat Solmaz and Umut Açikalin An Amazon Prime release.
Running time: 1:31

