Review of Time to Love / Sevmek Zamanı, directed by Metin Erksan

For the longest time, whenever I opened up MUBI on my laptop, I saw Time to Love as one of the movies smack down in the carousels that were below the featured movie of the day. And every time I saw that little feature and blurb of it overlapping a scene, I thought how interesting this film seemed.

Yet I never watched it. There was always something else to watch or do, so I never got around to it until I had to. That seems to be a reoccurring story throughout my life lately.

What spurred me to watch the film was the fact I was straight up cancelling my MUBI account. I had way too many subscriptions at the time and knew that I was draining money down the hole for some of them, and it was time to let go of MUBI. I wasn’t using it as much, and I could do monthly payments here and there to catch up if needed.

So I made my list of movies I wanted to watch before I departed the platform, and Time to Love was the second to last film I watched. I knew I wouldn’t really find it elsewhere, so it was kind of a priority before I let my subscription go into the nether or void to see this.

And so I watched it over the course of two days. Here’s my review!

A man falls in love with a woman after seeing her in a photo.

We could say our protagonist in this movie is an artist himself, specifically a painter. He does not have much money in his life, as he is relatively poor, but he does some art for a living when he can.

In the case of this movie, he has been hired to do the painting work inside of a Turkish villa, which is where he spots the image that’s going to change his life. While out there on the job, he sees the painting for the first time, and it’s love at first sight.

It’s not just for the art though—he’s enamored with the woman in the painting. Eventually, he does end up crossing paths with her, and his love only continues to grow deeper throughout the course of the movie.

However, she does not seem to share some of the same values. One could call this a film that juxtaposes more Middle Eastern ideals of love, passion, and romance against the concepts of modernization and Westernization. Our protagonist is someone who very much exemplifies the passionate side of things.

He doesn’t really rationalize as to why he loves this woman in a way that feels like it could be justified, but he still goes for his dreams anyways. But the woman is someone who is more Western based, and she approaches this with more logical concerns compared to her male counterpart.

This isn’t a long movie at all, despite me taking longer to finish it. It clocks in at an hour and 26 minutes, which means it’s relatively shorter than the more recent contemporary movies out on the market.

I will say that that this movie feels like a drag at times because of the romance and the push and pull happening there. It’s very Turkish in terms of style—you can see this as a precursor to some of the bigger Turkish filmmakers and movies today. But it feels like a drama, specifically the soap opera ones, at times.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, this is a lovely movie. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I can appreciate it and how it contextualizes the era it is set within.

While the romance is something that centers the movie in general, I think it’s very realistic in terms of how it utilizes realism to depict this time and place. I always enjoy when movies do this versus taking more creative liberties.

If you ever get a MUBI account, definitely check this one out if you’re ever even vaguely interested in it. I think we should all sometimes take leaps of faith, even when we’re not curtain about everything we’re going to watch.

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