Girlhood in Transit: Making Sense of Home in ‘Inpaintings’
- Lydia Smith
- Jun 19
- 5 min read
“I can’t stay in one place for long. I don’t feel at home anywhere... I don’t know why I’m like this.”
Last week I had a 16-hour layover in Istanbul. Although the airport is massive and there is more than enough to explore within its neoliberal echo chamber of miniature museums, duty-free stores and overpriced dining experiences, I immediately felt stifled. Furthermore, I’d never been anywhere near the region before. My airline sent me an email about a free Bosphorus boat tour for people passing through the city, so I lugged my bulky carry-on bags up to the disaffected customs officers, got my stamp, and within a few hours found myself floating along the strait that symbolically separates two continents.
I have no immediate connection to Turkey, but the aforementioned symbolism did play a hand in why the location provoked some reflection in me. I had just wrapped up an 11-month stint in Asia, my first extended stay in the Global South, during which time I had indubitably undergone a personal revolution. There’s no eloquent way to summarize the extent of these changes or to fully negate accusations of having fallen victim to the Eat, Pray, Love effect of Westerners who see other ways to live and choose to internalize them. Regardless of my insecurity, I knew that Istanbul would always be the place where I bridged two versions of myself, and therefore I granted it personal significance.
Long before I landed in the place formerly known as Constantinople, I had written an essay about Levan Akin’s Crossing (2024), a film that I argued positions the metropolis as the centerpiece of its drama, and even as a protagonist in its own right. With a population of over 15 million, it is, like most major cities, easy to disappear into. That interpretation was bolstered by a subsequent airplane screening of Ozan Yoleri’s Inpaintings (2023), the latest entry in my self-styled ‘God Help the Girl’ post-graduate drift subcanon, whose commiserable company includes Frances Ha (2012) and Actual People (2021).
In Inpaintings, protagonist Defne (Ahsen Eroglu) is a fine art restorationist who has returned to Istanbul after a Masters in France. Her friend has recently died, and most of her other relationships and plans – including one for a PhD – have been put on pause to grieve. After being tasked with a particularly difficult project at a short-term internship, she dedicates overtime, only for the effort to receive very little payoff.
If you’ve seen Frances Ha, you’ll know exactly which scene runs in parallel to Defne’s disappointment. I ached with secondhand remorse at the time she wasted. Given the scale of inconvenience for this problem in the grander scheme of life, I would imagine some people would be quick to write off my darlings as possessing “privileged people problems”. I’ve decided that that is ok. A more relativist point of view has allowed me to lean into the humanistic premise of mutual feeling rather than mutual experience, for none of us will ever live the exact same life. Watching Defne sort herself out of this funk was cathartic for me because her experience is marred by one question I ask myself almost daily: am I disillusioned by my environment, or in the very fiber of my being?
That one Adam Sandler ‘Trip to Italy’ skit on Saturday Night Live will tell you that it is you that you must carry, no matter where you go. But don’t some places harbor more weight than others? Might we not be more likely to relive past traumas in one setting than another? Is it up to us to transform our relationship with a space as opposed to fleeing from those reminders?
Defne's colleague: “Different cities. Different people. It sounds so nice.”
Defne: “Coming back is a strange transition. You collect memories everywhere you go. You don’t really belong to any of those places.”
I’ve collected a lot of memories while living in different places, and in many of those places, I continued feeling like an outsider until the very end. Even if you carve out your own circles and niches, your grasp on a culture in which you are not entrenched can shift quickly underfoot. Defne tells her mother that she’s not like her – that she cannot settle, that it is often more difficult to see a project through than it is to start all over again. Her mother keeps a tight lip at this admission – most people don’t have a choice, you know – but it is how Defne feels, and it is how I often feel, too.
While living with a roommate, Defne succumbs to a cigarette habit and bad sleep routines. She’s disturbed that her grandfather finds himself in and out of the hospital. Is his illness grave enough to consume her full attention? Or is it just another peripheral development in a lifetime full of happenstance and adaptation? In some ways, she wagers, going back to France is an escape from the baggage of home. In other ways, it's a manner of re-tying herself to a potentially moot ambition. Her art restoration career was once a passion, but has now devolved into a manner of filling up the days.
The film is decorated with childhood archival video, whose artistic incorporation always conveys to me a dilemma of self-identification. Would that little girl recognize herself all grown up? Would she be proud of the person she’s become? The same is true of the film’s final scenes, which depict three generations of women in her family sharing a meal. If not for societal norms, would all have chosen the life of freedom that Defne has created for herself?
Because no place is empirically better than another, it might seem like a step backward that Defne chooses to leave her family again. But even though she spent her time back in Istanbul in a state of confusion, it is still a valid chapter in her life; by the time she begins the next phase, time will have given that last segment purport.
I believe we’re meant to come and go. I believe the sanctity of a well-developed perspective demands both proximity and distance, ease and challenge, desire and restraint. I believe it is our duty to confront fears in order to feel agency in our own lives.
It is on a river in Istanbul, city of transience, that I came to terms with myself as the sole harbinger of continuity. And thus what I find in Defne, a self-insert character who calls the place home, is the comfort that whatever meaning I’m searching for by leaving will only make itself apparent to me in time.
-Lydia
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