All the glare of the publicity that has been generated for this movie because of some sex scene between Beren Saat and Murat Unalmis has been apparently not enough to make it a hit movie. The Turkish movie industry has been trying to treat the 82 coup d'etat over the past few years. Unfortunately, the so-called movie moguls either made a mess of the subject by treating it in a melodramatic ideological fashion (as in "Son Cellat-The Last Hangman) or they just used it as a minor subtext to accentuate a love story or to underscore a story of filial love (as in My Father and My Son).Tant pis, this one is no different than that. The movie starts with a flashback ; Gece, a kid of 5-6 year old(Beren Saat) witnesses the death of her parents during a police raid in the aftermath of 82 coup. After the flashback, we see Gece as a member of a left-wing gang. She gets chosen as a suicide-bomber. She is not an angst-ridden teenager but she seems to have learned to live with sorrows and she wants to take a revenge for her parents. Beren Saat puts in a convincing performance as the greenhorn suicide bomber but she looks too young to be someone thirty given the fact that the events set in a year of late 2000s. This is a major goof which is insulting even to general cinema-goers.
While Gece is on the wait for the attack day, she stays at a flat where the organization arranges for her.Gradually, she starts to have feelings for Yusuf (Murat Ünalmis),the son of the concierge. Though she knows that the relationship can have no future, she still can't keep herself away from him. While the movie questions the act of vengeance and implies the notion that "ideologies somehow,someday die but love prevails" it does not really question the ideology. By juxtaposing the 80's revolutionary militants who lost their lives for their ideology and today's revolutionary militants who try to grapple with the modern day capitalism, the movie does not really achieve its purpose.In the first half,it sounds like it's so partisan that it glorifies the actions of left-wing militants but in the second half it sounds like it's so simple and naive that in today's world left-wing gangs fight for no noble purpose.It's more like saying: "Give up on this stuff.Go home,make love!" As a cinema viewer, I am not sure where the movie stands and which half we should take credit for.Still,we should not be surprised by the fact the movie does not exactly focus on one thing because, the screen play writer of this movie Mahsun Kırmızıgül always does this. An example? Think about Günesi Gördüm (I saw the Sun). While we were thinking we would see a harrowing movie about lives broken asunder by the ethnic PKK terror we saw an unnecessary,stopgap transsexual subtext which could have been the subject of a different movie. We don't know how the director went along with all this but The Wings of The Night is just a damp squib,another resounding flop about one of our notorious coup d'etats.