‘Commitment Hasan’ Review: Turkish Director Semih Kaplanoglu Navigates Cultural Nuances of Remorse and Redemption

In the early moments of “Commitment Hasan,” Turkish writer-director Semih Kaplanoglu’s slow-burning morality tale, one could mistake the titular character for a weak, vulnerable individual others routinely walk all over. Portrayed with a quiet sense of stealth by Umut Karadag, Hasan is a fairly prosperous farmer and gardener tending to the family land he inherited from his father, a windswept, fecund place of tomato fields and apple orchards. In the opening sequence, he puts up a silent and losing fight against an arrogant engineer who drops by his plot unannounced and informs Hasan that an electrical pylon would soon be erected right in the middle of his field as part of the government’s plan to enhance the region’s power grid. Hasan sheepishly protests: Why wouldn’t they reroute the expansion and choose the vacant neighboring field instead? Predictably, his objections fall on deaf ears.Soon though, Kaplanoglu...