This is from the renowned Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan who won the
Grand Prix three years ago in Cannes for “Uzak” and won the Fipresci Award
this year at Cannes for this film. Now honestly I have no idea what the Fipresci
Award is for but I assume it is of merit. I also admit to knowing absolutely
nothing about Turkish films as this was my first one and I have no idea if
this is in any way representative of them (I hope to convince a friend to
begin a blog on Turkish films so that I can learn more about them). I came
away with a few broad impressions of the film – it feels very European to
me – in particular Italian or French with its slow calm intimate exploration
of a souring relationship and everyone in Turkey seems to spend an enormous
amount of time drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes!
It is beautifully shot (in HD video) with some stunning landscapes but primarily
in stark close-up’s with the faces of the actors practically imploding on
the screen. A relationship between a middle aged professor (played by the
director) and his younger TV actress girlfriend (played by the director’s
wife, Ebru Ceylan) is dissected and laid bare with a particular focus on
the male psyche. The film begins in the summer with the two of them on a
long needed holiday to the seashore, but this is a relationship clearly in
trouble weighed down and sinking with a past indiscretion as the obvious
culprit. But it is deeper than just that and by the time the holiday is over
so are they and they return to their separate lives in Istanbul, where the
man again takes up with his previous indiscretion. In a scene that was really
surprising to me (as I had assumed that Turkey might have some strict censorship
rules around sexual content – the Ministry of Education just censored out
a picture of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” from school textbooks),
the couple engages in some very rough and revealing sex (at which time a
number of folks walked out) and the viewer begins to rework their assumptions
about this guy. He can’t shake his former girlfriend out of his system though
and follows her to a TV shoot into the snowy east of Turkey where neither
of them can really express what they want or really seem to know what they
need.
The film is very slow and in truth very little happens but it has such a
sense of blemished reality to it that you feel like you are almost a voyeur.
It is an honest and intriguing portrait of a man who is seemingly fairly
solid and mature but at his core somehow very hollow and incomplete.
