Movie Nation

Scenic Greece, Laure Calamy, Olivia Côte and Kristen Scott Thomas is in it, speaking French?

July 14.

Today’s journey Around the World with Netflix takes us to Peru, land of the Incas, the Plains of Nazca and these doggoned “¡Asu Mare!” comedies by comic, writer, actor and now director Carlos Alcántara.

The films began ten years ago with a comical autobiography of how Alcántara became the most famous funnyman in Peru. But over four films, “¡Asu Mare!” — that’s a Peruvian exclamation of surprise — has evolved into accounts of the misadventures of four hapless “friends” who appeared in some of those films.

“¡Asu Mare! Los amigos” has Alcántara stepping behind the camera for the first time for a comic tale of eviction, cuisine, politics and dirty money as those four friends — inept businessman Poroto (Emilram Cossío), divorced musican Jaime Culicich (Andrés Salas), street-vendor/clothier Chato (Miguel Vergara) and perpetual hothead Lechuga (Franco Cabrera) — try to start a restaurant in a long-abandoned urban villa.

Long review short, it’s not very good, although the players are game and the direction competent, despite having no flair for turning a laugh-starved script into something funny.

A prologue shows us the guys as tweens frightened after running into Poroto’s uncle’s long-abandoned McMansion as they flee the police, who aren’t keen on their pranks.

Decades later, when Poroto’s latest hair-growing gadget goes bust, when Chato’s motortrike clothing store — complete with shower curtain “changing room — is impounded (he’s been living in it, on the streets), when Culi’s ex-wife takes his kid to Miami and Lechuga is fired for getting into a tussle with a rich racist who calls him “Sambo” on the job — this house could be their salvation.

Throw a barbecue to finance fixing it up, fix it up to open a restaurant.

The comedy comes from a little slapstick, some energetic but not that creative pratfalls, a chase, and limp jokes — in Spanish with English subtitles — some of them self-referential.

“Cachín (Alcántara’s character in some of the earlier films) said this will be the last ‘¡Asu Mare!’ movie! He’s full of crap!”

They freely acknowledge they’re stealing from themselves, if not in plots, then in situations.

“You’re acting like Cachín in the second movie!”

Character names can be Spanish jokes (Lechuga means “lettuce”) or Peruvian slang (“Culi” means “butt”). Not exactly hilarious.

Some of the pratfalls almost find a laugh, but any time the cast and the filmmakers lead the extras in a closing credits sing-along and you’re not Gurinder Chadha, we can tell you’re out of ideas.

Rating: TV-14, profanity, a drug abuse scene, nudity in silhouette

Cast: Franco Cabrera, Andrés Salas, Emilram Cossío, Miguel Vergara, Ximena Palomino, Fiorella Luna and Sandro Calderon.

Credits: Directed by Carlos Alcántara, scripted by Rasec Barrigan, Marco Rubina and Renato Fernandez. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

“Make Me Famous” is a playful documentary about the New York Lower East Side art scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s, structured as a biography and appreciation of one of the signature characters of that era.

Filmmaker Brian Vincent, a peripheral part of this “New Wave” era, tells us the story of Edward Brezinski via archival footage and a parade of anecdotes from his contemporaries, the famous and the less famous. Thanks to their differing appreciations of the man, the film is both celebratory and bitchy, championing Brezinski at one moment, dismissing him as a narcissistic “boob” and worse in others.

The man doesn’t even merit his own Wikipedia page, but here he is, the embodiment not only of his “scene” but of the “neo expressionist” art of his day.

Vincent and co-writer/filmmaker Heather Spore give us a biography firmly-anchored in its context, a mostly-ruined East (Greenwich) Village of flops, tenements and dumpy, “low-rent storefront galleries” which was the anti-Soho of its day.

Keith Haring and (neo-expressionist) Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel were the art stars of that era. But down in the East Village, Brezinski and “shadow” artist Richard Hambleton and James Romberger, David McDermott and others were “living in garbage,” making art and holding openings, “manic” to “make it,” and pooling their efforts in group shows in the hope of surfing a self-branded “New Wave” in art that might mimic the New Wave in music.

Through interviews with the survivors of that scene — a model, art critics, “gallerists,” artists and collectors, Vincent takes us back to those days and the poses of the poseurs who made it, most of them 70ish dandies and artsy fashion statements to this day.

The milieu — struggle and poverty and AIDS and deaths by overdose or suicide — is summoned back to life, as is the role of villains of that time — Ronald and Nancy Reagan — skewered by satiric portraits by Brezinski and others because of the not-so-benign neglect they brought to AIDS.

Poverty made Brezinski and the rest “pure, just by default,” one of them remembers. We see it for ourselves in short films, home videos and the like of gallery openings, parties, clubs and artist-in-his (almost entirely men) element footage of Brezinski himself.

The mercurial, faddish nature of art trends is mocked — “What’s next? Oh, minimalism again?” — as dealers and collectors collectively abandoned painting, came back for “stencils” (pre-dating Banksy by a decade), embraced the realistic “replacement” art installations of Robert Gober, only to have painting come back with a vengeance in Soho and further south, in the East Village.

 Brzezinski, who fiddled with the spelling of his name (of course), made the scene by making “a scene,” infamously eating one of Gober’s “Realistic” donut sculpltures as a stunt, only to realize how toxic the damned things were. It was an incident destined, perhaps even calculated, to make it into the man’s obituary.

Vincent lets interview subjects dig themselves into pretentious holes, allows them to skewer each other and this or that critic or gallery owner only to let the gallery owner give her side of a feud or his take on who didn’t “make it” and why.

And Vincent’s film turns into a sizzle reel for a Netflix series or feature film remake as he and Spore investigate the mysterious circumstances of the struggling artist’s death. Yes, they all dream of “faking” their deaths to drive up their asking prices.

Even though they’re older, now, and dressed to the nines for their appearances on camera (most of them), even though that Capote-esque pixie McDermott lives in a manor house in rural Ireland, there’s still something punk rock about this crowd, with more than a hint of the punks who sold out. We called them “New Wave,” too.

It makes for a fun if sometimes shambolic (a few anecdotes ramble on) remembrance of a time and an artist who symbolized it. And if the filmmakers didn’t buy up a few Brezinskis before releasing this, that’s on them.

Rating: unrated, drug and sexual content

Cast: Edward Brezinski, Duncan Hannah, Peter McGough, James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook, David McDermott, Eric Bogosian, Richard Hambleton, Marcus Leatherdale, Patti Astor, Kenny Scharf, Annina Nosei, Claudia Summers, Walter Robinson

Credits: Directed by Brian Vincent, scripted by Heather Spore and Brian Vincent. A Red Splat release.

Running time: 1:32

“Past Lives” is a lovely, bittersweet reverie built on a premise that flirts with fantasy.

Are we “fated” to be with who we end up loving and spending our lives with, and if we are, what happens when events conspire to break that fate?

Playwright and screenwriter (“The Wheel of Time”) Celine Song gets a soulful, brittle romance full of longing, regret and loneliness out of that in a story of childhood not-quite-sweethearts whose shared past and Korean heritage tug at them well into adulthood.

Song establishes the sadness that hangs over the story in the opening shot. Three people — played by Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro — are observed by strangers across the New York bar who try to figure out what the relationship is between the two Koreans locking eyes and talking with intense interest, and how the scruffy and seemingly miserable “white guy” who is part of this party and whom they “aren’t even talking to” fits its into that.

Are the Koreans siblings?

A flashback to 24 years before settles that. Na Young (Moon Seung-ah) is seen as a “crybaby” 12 year-old, always engaged in academic competition with her friend Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min), and prone to getting upset when she loses.

He clumsily comforts her, but it’s easy to see their connection is deep, even at that age. They kind of want to try a “date,” which might only be a playground playdate, but the “crush” is real as is the attraction .

But she’s about to leave. Her artist mother and filmmaker father are immigrating, and she and her sister have to pick out English-sounding names. Michelle becomes her kid sister’s name, Nora will be hers.

She jokes to Hae Sung and others at school that she can’t stay because “No Nobel prize winners come from Korea,” but that just wounds him.

A long, silent walk home from school sees a quietly-stricken Hae Sung bid a single word “Bye” to his friend as they part ways, with her literally hiking higher and him turning to to take that level side street that signifies his constancy in conflict with her higher aspirations.

As Nora (Lee) and Hae Sung (Yoo) settle into separate futures and diverging destinies, they lose touch. But Nora, pursuing a life as a playwright, acknowledges a certain ennui about her family’s decision to leave, the tug of home and this Korean concept of fate — “In-yun” — that suggests things happen for a reason, that souls fated to be together have had “8,000 earlier encounters that ordain it.

It’s mysterical and traditional and yes, it’s kind of apt that the best online explanation of it comes from the pastor and cult leader Rev. Moon, another Korean immigrant.

Song’s screenplay introduces this idea on three timelines — their childhood separation, their just-after-college years, when social media has made it possible for Hae Sung to “find my friend,” and another 12 years after that, when they finally meet face to face in New York.

The problem with that belated reconnection is that Nora’s now a playwright, bouncing from productions to grants to artist’s retreats, where she met the Jewish novelist-to-be Arthur (Magaro), whom she married.

Song and her finely-tuned performers make the just-after-college-years Skype calls warm and vulnerable. It takes HaeSung a bit to admit that he reached out in search of her because “I missed you.” The bounce that comes to Nora’s step at their renewed contact, the uninhibited smile that Lee wears in the conversations, lets us root for them as a couple.

Yoo’s tentative take on Hae Sung shows us a guy who lives an “ordinary” Korean life — military service, years of nights out drinking with his mates — someone perhaps “stuck” and thus drawn back to this deep childhood connection, but unwilling or unable to grow to make something of it. He learns Mandarin, because “it will help me with my work (in Korean with subtitles),” not English, Nora’s primary language. He urges her to visit Seoul, but isn’t ready to move heaven and Earth to get to New York, where she’s settled.

With her starting her career and him starting his as an “ordinary” engineer, any reunion could be a year or more away. This long distance connection is impractical, and somebody’s going to have to say so.

Song and the cast take the unspoken pain and obvious awkwardness to a whole other level with that third act New York meeting, set in familiar landmarks and striking, under-filmed scenic spots along the river and under the bridges. These scenes ache and truly sell this culture clash/cultural pull romantic premise, far-fetched or not.

Sometimes, the best romances are unconsummated or otherwise incomplete, be they a “Brief Encounter” or trapped in the amber of “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a movie that Nora helpfully recommends to Hae Sung. It’s not the “love” that lasts. It’s the longing.

And in filtering that universal emotion through a Korean ex-pat lens, Song has given us THE romance of the summer of 2023.

Rating: PG-13, profanity

Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, Moon Seung-ah, Leem Seung-min, John Magaro

Credits: Scripted and directed by Celine Song. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:45

Treat Williams broke out in “Prince of the City,” a classic righteous officer in a sea of corrupt cops picture, shone bright in “Hair,” in dramas on screen and TV.

But when I heard this active, lovely, always working spirit died in a Vermont motorcycle wreck today, my first thought was his stretch as a comically bullying soldier in Spielberg’s “1941.”

Waaaaaay over the top, and fun.

His Twitter presence was a grace note on his profession, kind and tolerant and always about the work when he got it. He loved flying, motorcycling and traveling for work.

And he was working all the time. He had series and Hallmark movies and a few great film credits, some 120 appearances on the screen in all. From young idealists or hotheads to authority figures, fathers and grandfathers, he lent a bit of class and stature to every project he signed onto.

His friend Mark Hamill reminded everybody on Twitter that Williams even passed muster in the “Star Wars” universe.

But dang it, it’s him all crazed and lecherous in “1941” that sticks in my mind. He could be a hoot when the situation demanded it.

Rest in Peace.

“The Catholic School” is a story ripped from recent Italian history, the story of a heartless kidnapping, rape and murder in an age when Italian law did not consider rape a crime against a woman, but rather against the public morals.

The Dark Age in which the Circeo Massacre, as they dubbed it in the press, took place preceded even the Amanda Knox case in giving Italian “justice” a black eye, but at least prompted something resembling a little soul searching about who they were as a culture and the sorts of sons they were raising.

Stefano Mordini’s serious-minded film, based on a novelized memoir account of the case by a classmate of the perpetrators, is a clumsy attempt to “explain” these boys in a Leopold & Loeb way, to recreate the La vita privilegiata these rich monsters grew up in and the school that “produced” them.

Their classmate at San Leone Magno School, Edoardo (Emanuele Maria Di Stefano) is our narrator, and takes us into this world of “virtually limitless freedom,” of bullying, money, and sexism taken to savage extremes, practically ticking off the “contributing factors” that led to this “violent time” (in Italian with subtitles, or dubbed) in an Italy that must have produced these kids.

One classmate’s professor-father comes out of the closet and moves out of the family home. The priest and coach of the swim team is spotted picking up prostitutes. One kid’s same-sex attraction hints at masochistic tendencies, another’s worship of his pal’s sister abruptly bears fruit. One student is having an affair with the actress mother of a classmate. One particularly brutish kid’s rich father buys his way out of trouble right up to the moment a body and a surviving victim are found.

There are devout Catholics in their ranks, a tragedy preceding the tragic “event,” a hunting trip, a ritualized initiations into secret societies, parties and pickups and sex and boys with “fascist tendencies” writing essays in admiration of Adolf Hitler and not taking it well when their deep thoughts aren’t appreciated.

None of this is that original or affecting, and NONE of it “explains” “How we groomed a pack of rich monsters.”

We’re treated to a sort of “Rules of the Game” take on how the rich kids lived and learned back then, cossetted in a bubble of money and class, and then jarringly hurled into a graphic depiction of the preparations and the commitment of the crime.

Director and co-writer Mordini makes a total hash of things by battering the timeline into atoms, constantly skipping from “three months before the event” to “130 hours” before back to “two months before,” and on and on.

I kind of get what he was going for. But this is so ham-fisted you wish some woman exec in the production had given Mordini a good bawling out over the lack of sensitivity, whatever accuracy he was going for with the crime, for the women in the story.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Emanuele Maria Di Stefano, Giulio Pranno, Benedetta Porcaroli, Federica Torchetti, Alessandro Cantalini, Francesco Cavallo, Leonardo Ragazzini, and Valeria Golino

Credits: Directed by Stefano Mordini, scripted by Luca Infascelli, Massimo Gaudioso and Stefano Mordini, based on the book by Edoardo Albinati. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

I’ve taken to disparaging a lot of the streaming series I’m pitched and that I get around to sampling or even reviewing as “drip drip drip” storytelling.

Even the cliffhanger serials of yore, the ones that Lucas and Spielberg were referencing in “Star Wars” and the Indiana Jones franchises, got to the point quicker.

These days, it’s backfill/backfill/backfill that story. But wait…something finally happened. Yay.

Perhaps the streamers have found an algorithm that predicts how far you can hang onto the viewer before they give up. Is it three dull episodes, or does that come when episode four is paddling in the same circle, just a different pond?

Case in point, “The Crowded Room,” a new Apple TV+ series by Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. He adapted the story of a real-life accused criminal whose groundbreaking contribution to American jurisprudence was being the first to be acquitted by reason of disassociative identity disorder.

Goldsman took that case — already the subject of a Netflix docu-series — and its late ’70s New York milieu, fleshed it out with details from his own life, and cooked up 10 hours of paranoid delusions and unreliable memories by our accused man (Tom Holland) framed in the loooooooong interogations by a psychologist/interrogator, played by Amanda Seyfried.

Danny (Holland) and the mysterious Arianna (Sasha Lane) stalk a man through Manhattan, taking their shot at shooting him in the middle of the crowded Rockefeller Plaza. Danny is the only one hone the cops caught.

The police are looking for the missing Arianna, and the elusive Israeli (Lior Raz) who took Danny and her in and defended him against a bullying stepfather (Will Chase) and bullying classmates.

Our interrogator wants to know where they are, about Danny’s first encounters with them, and “be as precise as possible,” because, you know, this is a mini-series and we’ve got a lot of time to fill.

We’re treated to sequence after sequence, episode after episode, introducing characters who seem like the perfect supportive friend/lover/savior/protector, just when Danny mght be expected to first encounter that “type” of person, or just when Danny needs someone just like this as he flees that stepfather and his unable-to-protect-him-mother (Emmy Rossum), makes time with the pretty new transfer student (Emma Laird) and comes of age, learning about love, sexuality and drugs in the suburban and even urban New York of the late ’70s.

A lovely shot here and there, a few violent set-pieces, doled out one or two per episode, and the handle we think we have on this from the start is tested and twisted as we acknowledge there may be not just one “unreliable narrator.”

Apple TV+ served up a trio of episodes to draw viewers in, and my hat’s off to anybody so enthralled by this slow-walking thriller that they’re ready to invest in the whole series after that opening weekend. I found the first-three over-detailed and dull, and I say that as someone who lived through the ’70s and owned most of the LPs sampled in this Original Hits soundtrack.

I noted the verbal anachronisms and the run-of-the-mill inaccuracies. Danny expresses a concern about being 18 and “draftable” five years after the draft ended, for instance.

As the show jumps to episodes in London (with Jason Isaac) and elsewhere, I just shrugged and accepted that this is just par for the streaming serial course — a ton of details, a lot of “life being lived,” little of it moving the plot forward.

With preview screeners, I got a lot farther into than you did. No, it doesn’t get quicker, more insightful, more engrossing and entertaining. It doesn’t get better.

At least “The Night Of” (2016) made interrogation reconstructions interesting. At least “Ozark” (2017) introduced characters and killed them, establishing the stakes, right from the start.

As least “Ted Lasso” (2020) was fish-out-of-water cute with characters you could identify with and/or root for. For a while.

A couple of the performances here are pitched at a level that’s almost engaging. But wandering through vivid recreations of New York’s (gay) club scene on the cusp of New Wave, London stock footage exteriors and generic interiors becomes almost sleep inducing.

There are NO STAKES IN “The Crowded Room.” How did the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “A Beautiful Mind” as well as “A Time to Kill” and “The Da Vinci Code” forget that? The characters are neither relatable nor that interesting.

As one looks at the aggregated reviews for popular serials, it’s easy to get the idea that nobody “gets” that “WandaVision” and “The Mosquito Coast” or This Week’s Hot Topic/Series or that “Lasso” or “Ozark” later season is all narrative filler decorated with Easter Eggs and the odd gripping or winning moment.

But others are noticing. Just the other day, a Twitter user tagged @topherflorence complained “back in the day if u did a tv show called “Surf Dracula” you’d see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gotta be a long-ass flashback about how he got the surfboard…”

Which hits the nail right on the head, doesn’t it? They’re all “Crowded Rooms,” and drip by drip by drip, there’s no sense confusing clutter for quality.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Tom Holland, Amanda Seyfried, Sasha Lane, Lior Raz, Emmy Rossum, Emma Laird, Will Chase, Jason Isaac.

Credits: Series created and written by Akiva Goldsman, based on the book “The Minds of Billy Milligan,” by Daniel Keyes.

Running time: 10 episodes @58 minutes each.

This international child trafficking thriller built around “The Passion of the Christ” star opens July 4.

But what’s “really” going on here? What agenda is in play?

Caviezel has made films like this his cause, and he adds a little message to that effect on the tag line of this trailer.

It’s a real problem amplified into a global crisis by conservatives who really want to drown out the tsunami of priests, youth pastors, preachers and conservative politicians caught and charged with pedophilia here in the US.

It’s why they’ve adopted “groomer” as a favorite insult. Untold scores of them look in the mirror and that’s what they see.

I’m hard-pressed to think of another author in the English language whose work seemed destined for “mini series” treatment than Charles Dickens. The man wrote novels in serial form. He was literally incentivized to write long. When the serialized story “Great Expectations” became a book, it was published in three volumes.

But even though I appreciated the “Little Dorritt” PBS series that PBS picked up some years back, and tried to get into the various TV incarnations of “Bleak House,” he still seems like the perfect wordy writer to boil down to feature film length adaptations. The poor reviews for the current “Great Expectations” series seem to back that up.

There have been several takes on this novel on the big screen over the years. Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow even managed a perfectly acceptable modern version filmed and set near on the Gulf Coast of Florida. But it is the third film of Dickens’ pentulimate novel, the one David Lean filmed in 1946, which endures.

DLean had only recently transitioned from editor to director, and this, his first Dickens adaptation, stands as the definitive “Expectations,” and sits happily on any list of the most beautiful films ever made in black and white.

The production design by John Bryan and Oscar-winning art direction by Wilfred Shingleton has a lovely “Hard Times” look of struggle, inequity and decay. There were hints of Dickensian England still extant, even after two World Wars, so summoning up the era in 1946 wasn’t the most difficult reach.

And Guy Green’s Oscar-winning cinematography played up the shadows, gloom, fog and fear that captivates the viewer from its opening moments, a boy (Tony Wager) stumbling into a gigantic convict (Finlay Currie) in a foggy church cemetery just before dusk.

A fine cast that included the cream of British character players — Currie, Martita Hunt, Valerie Hobson, Francis L. Sullivan, Bernard Miles, Ivor Barnard — rising star John Mills, Lean’s future muse Alec Guinness and future starlet Jean Simmons brought the iconic characters of this brooding, comical cliffhanger of a novel to life.

Lean and co-writer Ronald Neame gave the novel a decent trimming, condensing characters as they did, making one of the best cases for Dickens being the perfect writer to adapt. It’s easy to get a taste of characters and scenes that don’t need to be play out at full, exhaustive length for us to get the gist of them.

No. It only seemed Dickens was “paid by the word.”

Romantic comedies that work typically walk a fine line between expectations if familiarity, and surprise that delights.

We have to root for the couple, even though we anticipate them rubbing each other the wrong way — at first.

You can get away with not being hilarious if the picture is cute enough, and get away with not being all that cute if it’s funny enough.

I’ve been watching Turkish rom-coms for a couple of years, hoping they’d show me somebody there was getting the hang of this Westernized genre. Because it’s pretty obvious they want to.

“You Do You” is Westernized, fluffy and formulaic, a tale of a sassy young fashionista trying to find a shortcut into her dream career — designing. There’s a touch of wish-fulfillment fantasy about the improbable ways perky Miss Merve (Ahsen Eroglu) gets this or that foot in the door.

But it’s a rom-com with a few chuckles, some twisty, distinctly Turkish complications and a bubbly, beguiling lead, nicely matched-up with the villainous love interest/entrepreneur played by Ozan Dolunay.

As familiar as it feels, it plays.

Merve Kültür is the daughter of a once-famous investigative TV reporter. But while mother Nevra (Zühal Olcay) sits in their apartment, watching tapes of her old reports and muttering about what “real journalism” used to look like, Merve raids her wardrobe to create each day’s wacky “You Do You” style.

Her mother still has the connections to line up job interviews for her business-degreed daughter. But Merve is blunt-to-the-point-of-mouthy and always screws them up. She wants to work for the bigwig at the big fashion mag, but sabotages that in a shared elevator ride without even realizing it.

Dark forces are organizing to upset her cushy, well-kept thanks-to-mom’s-famous-name life of selfie/statements. This dude Anil (Dolunay) is watching her and watching her building.

He’s bought the building, and is evicting Merve, Mom, the tailor on the ground floor and the gay best friend/neighbor (It’s a Turkish rom-com trope TOO!).

When a desperate Merve turns to her creative friends, led by online-marketing whiz Nil (Burcu Türünz), their solution is a dating app that deploys a mask so that people will unguardedly express their true selves. Call it SoulMate.

Who can they get to back this start-up? Why, that multi-business, multi-millionaire venture capitalist Anil Gürman of course.

But the way he engineers a spilled-coffee “meet cute” with Merve tells us something is up. When he instantly blank-checks their “garbage” app idea, we suspect what she doesn’t. And when he gives her a job in his ready-to-wear fashion line, we know he’s messing with her and it’ll be up to Merve to figure this out.

“I want to see her run out of here crying,” he tells an underling (in Turkish with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

Her mother may think the dude’s surname rings a bell, but Merve plunges into an abusive work environment, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and naive as all get out.

“You need to take a step if you want to move forward,” she says, rationalizing grunt work that’s never taken seriously, a supervisor who steals her ideas and a boss who has taken on the mask of a wolf for the video chat stalking of her he does on SoulMates.

It’s a cliche to have our heroine address the camera, drolly and directly, with little “mike drop” observations that start seeping into her to-your-face chats with her bosses, her mother, her estranged father who sold the building out from under them without warning or pity, even with her fellow fashion “experts” on the street.

The “complications” to her life and this hate-love relationship that may form with her creepy boss are more interesthing than the glib and flippant “solutions” the screenplay pulls out of the sky.

But Eroglu, a mainstay of Turkish TV, makes breaking the fourth wall fun, dressing down her superiors amusing and Merve a funny, sassy archetype who engages. With a good supporting cast, a few chuckles and a lot of cute situations, we’ve got ourselves a Turkish rom-com that kind of plays.

No, it’s not as funny as it is bubbly, not as fresh as it is easy sit through. But plainly director Cemal Alpan and the industry behind him is getting the hang of this rom-com thing.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Ahsen Eroglu, Ozan Dolunay, Zühal Olcay, Burcu Türünz and Ferit Aktug

Credits: Directed by Cemal Alpan, scripted by Ceylan Naz Baycan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39