The hot-air balloon ride in Love Tactics ought to be the softest moment in the film. Kerem takes Aslı up without knowing she is afraid of heights. She panics, he talks her down, and the two of them settle into the view. On paper that is sweet. On screen it plays like one more stop on a Cappadocia itinerary, and the fear that gives the scene its point turns up so abruptly that it never feels earned.

Emre Kabakuşak’s film, written by Pelin Karamehmetoğlu, follows Aslı (Demet Özdemir), a fashion designer who runs a blog called Love Tactics, where she advises her followers on relationships, and Kerem (Şükrü Özyıldız), an advertising executive. Neither believes in love. A follower dares her to make a man fall for her, and Kerem’s friend Tuna holds a project hostage until Kerem does the same with a woman. Each of them picks the other. The bet is a slight engine, and the script keeps feeding it with machinery: a party, a shared cab, a cardigan left behind so that someone has a reason to call, then a work trip to Cappadocia where they happen to land on the same plane. You can see every gear turn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExfET5C8dFg

The film is at its best when it stops scheming. Özdemir and Özyıldız are easy together, and their banter has a lightness the plot rarely gives them. The pottery basement, where Kerem hands her a small vase and shows her how to shape her own, is a quiet scene and a good one. So is the dinner at his place, with the food he cooks and the film he projects in the backyard. When the characters on that screen kiss in the rain, Kerem switches on the sprinklers. It is corny, and it works anyway, because the actors let it be corny.

The structure is where the trouble starts. The script keeps cutting between Aslı’s plans and Kerem’s, and the two so often have the same idea at the same moment that the editing begins to feel like a rally. She flirts with the new partner Servet (Özgür Ozan) to make Kerem jealous, and Kerem answers with Servet’s daughter Meltem, the very woman he fled at the party. Then both of them are drunk and asleep at the table. It is a gag, not a turn in the story.

The supporting players get little room. Tuna (Atakan Çelik), Emir (Doğukan Polat), Ezgi (Hande Yılmaz) and Cansu (Deniz Baydar) mostly exist to hear the leads confess and to say aloud what we have already worked out. When Tuna decides Kerem is in love, nobody in the audience needs the news.

The piano is the one thread that gives Kerem any weight. His mother left, he cannot bring himself to throw the instrument out, and he will not let anyone touch it, himself included. When Aslı sits down to play in the middle of the night, the film finally has something to say. It arrives late, though, and then the story hurries on. Her blog suffers a similar fate. It is set up as the premise, and by the time she tells Cansu she no longer wants to continue it, it has done very little.

Kabakuşak’s direction is competent and plain. I can’t name a shot I would want to see again, and Cappadocia is photographed the way a place already famous for being beautiful tends to be, as if the landscape were doing the work. At 98 minutes the film is not long, yet Decider, in its review of the Netflix release, found it dragged anyway, and that matches my own restlessness in the middle stretch.

Love Tactics reached Netflix on 11 February 2022 and drew the verdict its title promises: predictable, but likable. A sequel, Love Tactics 2, followed, directed by Recai Karagöz and again written by Karamehmetoğlu. The first film is a pleasant evening with two charming leads and a script that never trusts them enough.