Filed under romance, action and drama, Art of Love never lets any of the three take the wheel. Its Turkish title, Romantik Hırsız, translates as “The Romantic Thief”, and that is the better name, because it points at the character who might have given Recai Karagöz’s film a center. Netflix released it on 14 March 2024. Once the premise has been laid out, the film puts it down and lets the running time tick by around it.

Alin (Esra Bilgiç) is an Interpol officer who has been chasing an art thief. Then she learns that he is Güney (Birkan Sokullu), her ex-lover, and she concocts a plan to catch him red-handed. As an engine for a story, that works. You would expect a woman who once loved her target to feel every move against him as a private matter, and every small victory as slightly sour. Pelin Karamehmetoğlu’s script rarely allows either. Stories like this live or die in the scenes where the two principals share a room, and in those scenes the writing goes slack. We are told they loved each other. We are never made to believe it from the way they stand, look at one another or avoid looking. Suspicion and leftover desire are supposed to hang between them; what hangs there is nothing in particular, and the plan never seems to cost either of them anything.

The plan deserves more attention than the film gives it. Alin sets it in motion, so she has to use what she knows of Güney, and what she knows she learned by loving him. Here is real friction: her intimacy becomes an instrument, and each clever step is also a small betrayal of her own past. The script notices this and walks past. The plan advances because the plot needs it to, not because Alin has decided, painfully, to turn her memories into a weapon.

Then there is what the title itself promises. If the thief is the romantic of the piece, his trade ought to tell us something about him: why he steals, what he wants from the people he outwits, what he once was to Alin. Instead he arrives as a pleasant presence with little behind the pleasantness. Is he in love with the art, with the game, with her? The picture leaves the question untouched. Nothing suggests that the stealing is an act of feeling rather than a job done with style.

Sokullu is the more comfortable of the two leads. He gives Güney an easy, self-assured manner, and you can believe that a man like this is hard to catch. He also seems at home when the film asks him to be glib one minute and wounded the next. Bilgiç has the thankless part. Alin has to be a confident professional and a woman with unfinished business at once, and the performance settles on a single register. We almost never see her doubt herself, which is exactly what the story needs us to see. If Alin never wavers, the romance has nothing to push against, and Güney’s charm has nobody to work on. I suspect the script is at least as much to blame as the actor.

The supporting cast is thinly used. Fırat Tanış plays Faysal, Ushan Çakır is Ozan and Hakan Ummak is Ömer; they fill the edges of the story without ever pulling it toward themselves. Osman Alkaş is credited as the Chief Executive and Nil Keser plays Vera, and neither is given room to matter. These characters orbit the couple, and nobody in that orbit appears to have anything at stake if the thief is caught. The leads therefore carry almost all the weight alone, and they are not given enough to carry it with.

The action exposes the identity problem most plainly. The set pieces are competent and forgettable. They lack the invention and the physical risk that make a chase or a heist linger in the memory, and the pacing does nothing to help them. Ask what tempo the film wants and it has no answer. It slides from glossy to sentimental to tense with no bridge between the moods, and by the midpoint I could not tell which of the three it trusted. A thriller about former lovers could have turned that uncertainty into material, letting the characters’ mixed motives seep into the rhythm of the scenes. Instead the uncertainty belongs to the film alone.

Prague and Istanbul help, a little. Principal photography began in Prague in June 2023, moved on to Istanbul and wrapped in July. A story about a pursuit between ex-lovers at least looks as if it has been somewhere, and that is the department where the picture seems surest of itself. But pretty streets cannot warm a central relationship that stays cold from first scene to last.

A chase between former lovers ought to tighten the closer the hunter gets. This one thins out, scene by scene, until the ending arrives as a formality rather than a payoff. By the final scene, neither Alin nor Güney has shown us anything the synopsis hadn’t already promised. For a film built on history between two people, that emptiness is the costliest failure.

The critical record is small and mostly unkind. Rotten Tomatoes lists 20% positive among only five reviews, with an average of 4.3/10. Barbara Shulgasser-Parker of Common Sense Media gave it one star out of five, Mrinal Rajaram of Cinema Express two, Sveva Di Palma of Cinematographe.it 2.6 stars, and Gautaman Bhaskaran of News 18 2.5 out of 5. Mariam Fakhreddine of The Eastern Echo was the warmest, with 6.5/10. Five reviews hardly make a verdict, yet I sit much nearer the cold end of that range than the warm one.

A pursuit between ex-lovers should run hot on both sides of the law, and here the heat never arrives. The two leads chase each other through the plot, and the film still cannot make us feel the history that is supposed to drive them. Anyone who reads the synopsis will have guessed the shape of the story, and the film does little to complicate that guess before the final scene. I cannot recommend it.