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Gimme
shelter.. *****
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, Friday May 28, 2004
This story of two lonely
middle-aged Turkish men thrown together is both uplifting and hilarious..
If ever a film was composed in
a minor key, it is this beautiful and sad movie from the Turkish director
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which simply floats like a helium balloon above the
middling mainstreamers that have rolled up this week. It attains a clarity
and simplicity that lesser film-makers could strain every sinew trying
to achieve without ever getting anywhere. To Ceylan, these things are
as easy as breathing. Uzak is about loneliness and depression, and particularly
the kind of depression suffered by men of a certain age who would cut
their tongues out rather than admit they are depressed.
Yet the film itself is, gloriously, the opposite of depressing. It is
gentle and deeply humane, and even ventures into an arena of delicate
visual comedy with a shy adroitness that Woody Allen might admire. Watching
it is like taking a deep draught of cold, clear water. The fact that one
of its actors, Mehmet Emin Toprak, died shortly after filming only increases
its piquant quality.
Uzak means "distant": an idea whose metaphorical significance
matches, though without outstripping, the more obvious sense of physical
distance and estrangement. The movie actually forms the third of what
could be thought of as a trilogy of autobiographical movies from Ceylan,
the first two being The Small Town (1998) and Clouds of May (1999), works
which use the director's own friends and family and hometown locations.
Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) has made a success of his life as a photographer
living in an apartment in Istanbul, which he has furnished with a middle-aged
bachelor's fastidiousness. Professionally bored and disillusioned, he
is conducting a deeply unsatisfactory affair with a married woman and
has been forced to confront the reality of his life choices with the news
that his ex-wife is leaving for Canada with her new partner. Mahmut's
walls are crammed with books and CDs, but he is hardly ever shown reading
or listening to music, he mostly just watches TV, while glumly screening
out calls from his family on the answering machine. There are long scenes
in which Mahmut just, well, watches TV.
His life is upended by the deeply unwelcome arrival of Yusuf (Mehmet Emin
Toprak), a dopey country cousin from the same village that he has left
behind. Mahmut has promised his mother that he will let Yusuf stay in
his pristine flat while he looks for work in the big city. It isn't long
before Yusuf is getting on his nerves in a very big way, failing to find
work, showing every indication of getting comfortable and permeating the
carpet with cigarette smoke and fag ash. The realisation that Yusuf is
the nearest thing Mahmut will now ever get to human companionship in the
evening of his life is appallingly sad and funny.
Poor Yusuf is lonely too: though naturally communicating this to his prickly
and disapproving host is out of the question. There are long scenes in
which he does nothing but slope around Istanbul in the biting cold. Ceylan
found a day to shoot in which the city is made breathtakingly, serendipitously
beautiful in the snow, though forbidding and alienating at the same time.
What Yusuf wants is to be a merchant seaman, despite the fact that there
is simply no work in that line. "Could you take the loneliness of
a sailor's life?" Mahmut asks him sharply, the one and only time
the subject is raised, though without either man admitting its significance
in their own lives.
There are sublimely funny moments. Mahmut watches an arty movie on late-night
TV, longing for Yusuf to go to bed, so that he can watch porn instead.
But, when Yusuf bumbles back into the front room, he must scramble to
switch the filth off and get Tarkovsky back on. When a mouse is caught
by one of the sticky strips that houseproud Mahmut has laid out, it is
Yusuf who, with a residual sense of decency and a heartbreaking empathy
with the poor twitching animal, takes it outside in a plastic bag and
tries to despatch it humanely by bashing it against a wall, while Mahmut
impassively looks on. This odd-couple tragicomedy is so well acted by
both men, so utterly involving, and so real.
The cleverest sequence comes when Mahmut frostily asks if Yusuf has seen
a silver pocket-watch that has gone missing. Yusuf is not so stupid that
he does not understand the implied accusation and shrilly asks if Mahmut
has not just misplaced it. A close-up then tells us that this is indeed
the case, but Mahmut will not admit it to Yusuf: his loneliness, his inability
to articulate an apology and his tacit, internal admission of defeated
pride are disclosed to us in one effortlessly simple take.
Ceylan has superb compositions with a deep focus of beautifully realised,
crystalline detail, particularly his opening, painterly shot of a wintry
country landscape through which Yusuf is distantly trudging, as distant
as a bird, until his great pudding face looms up, filling our field of
vision. The movie is a series of these unhurried sequences, timed and
managed to perfection. Uzak is about the distances that open up inexorably
as we enter middle age: between the past and the present, between the
present and an unattainable future, and between lonely men who shut themselves
in their own impregnable carapaces of pride. Uzak is a film that I admire
more than I can say. It is one of the best movies of the year, perhaps
of many years - the work of a brilliant film-maker.
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