|
|
Distant
Rob Thomas, CAPITAL TIMES (USA), May 2004
Put two
painfully lonely men in the same apartment, and what happens? They stay
lonely.
That’s the message behind Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s bleak drama,
which took home the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
So little happens in the movie that at times the mind wanders, but the
cumulative force of so many quiet, unforced little moments add up, and
it wasn’t until a good hour after I’d seen the film that it really took
hold of me.
The movie opens with Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) trudging across a frozen
river in Istanbul. He’s a sweet but rather dim young man from a dying
Turkish factory town who has come to the big city looking for work. He
shows up on the doorstep of a distant cousin, Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir),
who has agreed to put him up for a few days.
Yusuf dreams of getting hired on a ship and sailing the world, but nobody
at the docks are hiring, and pretty soon he’s reduced to wandering around
the wintry city, hanging out in cafes, shadowing attractive women. He’s
a complete outsider in the midst of the bustling metropolis, unable to
make any connections whatsoever.
Mahmut lives a comfortable urban life, but he may be even lonelier than
Yusuf. His ex-wife is about to move to Canada with her new husband, and
although he’s clearly emotionally wounded, Mahmut can’t bring himself
to communicate anything more than pleasantries with her. Instead, he spends
his nights surfing the Internet and watching television. In one of the
film’s rare moments of humor, he even dreams about watching television.
In a more conventional film, Yusuf and Mahmut would initially hate each
other, and then grow to become friends and help each other out of their
downward spirals. “Distant” is not a conventional film. Yusuf and Mahmut
gradually grow to get on each other’s nerves, and most of their few conversations
in the film revolve around petty household issues like who forgot to flush
the toilet.
There’s a couple of moments, one involving a missing pocket watch and
the other involving a mouse caught in a glue trap, that seem like they’ll
push the two housemates towards some kind of meaningful resolution. But
nothing comes of it, and the movie just ends, with one of the two men
sitting on a park bench, smoking, alone as always.
“Distant” may sound like a downer, because it is. But it’s such a well-made
and affecting downer that you have to admire Ceylan’s steadfast refusal
to make things any brighter or more interesting for his two characters
than they would be in real life. Yusuf and Mahmut are utterly faceless
and almost emotionless characters, but you can’t help but feel for both
of them as they wander a city, painted in gorgeously dreary pearl grays.
In addition to the Grand Jury prize, Cannes also awarded a joint acting
award to Ozdemir and Toprak. But Toprak was unable to accept the award,
having died in a car accident a few months earlier. I thought I’d throw
that in there, just in case the movie alone isn’t depressing enough for
you.
|
