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Means
of escape
A
wealth of film descends on Durham
David Fellerath, Independent Weekly (USA), October
20, 2004
We've had some good movies this
year make it into the art houses, from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind to Before Sunset to Maria Full of Grace. But one of the year's best
is playing for two nights only in Duke University's Griffith Theater.
I refer to Uzak (Distant), a film from the exceptionally talented Turkish
director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It's a little puzzling that it falls to a
campus film society to bring us this film, because it was one of the favorites
at Cannes a year ago, winning the Grand Prix and a dual best actor award
for its two male, non-professional leads. (Ironically, the notorius Brown
Bunny, that festival's biggest bomb, opens this Friday in Chapel Hill.)
One reason for this could be that there's no established market for Turkish
films, which makes audiences wary, whereas we have a body of reference
points with which to approach French, Italian and Chinese movies. But
if interest can be generated in Iranian films, it seems that such a trick
could be accomplished for the cinema of a country that is, after all,
Iran's democratic and secular neighbor to the northwest. And for the last
month, Duke's Screen Society has attempted just such an introduction with
a program called "Arada/ Between: Contemporary Turkish Cinema."
F I L M B E A T
Unfortunately, I came late to the series of 10 films, which began last
month with a trilogy of films by Zeki Demirkubuz, who also appeared in
person on a panel with Jane Gaines, Frederic Jameson and others. Frankly,
the first Turkish film I caught, midway through the series, was a distinct
disappointment. Despite its promising echoes of Fassbinder--homoeroticism
and violence among immigrant hoodlums in Germany--the story gave way to
film school faux edginess and a patently ludicrous finish.
Happily, however, the three films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan that wrap up the
series this week are phenomenal, and the cumulative effect is astonishing
as we see Ceylan's techniques, themes and confidence develop by leaps
and bounds. All three are excellent, but they get progressively better
and, as it turns out, they really should be seen in order, for each one
is a commentary or reaction to the previous one, even if the three films
taken together aren't, strictly speaking, a trilogy.
The first, Kasaba (The Small Town), played last Monday night, and it's
a luminous and naturalistic account of a rural community in Ceylan's native
Anatolia. In its evocation of timeless rural themes (including some rough
treatment accorded a turtle and some goats) and the ruthlessly unchanging
cycle of seasons, the film recalls the early efforts of Ray and Ozu, and
also 19th-century painters and writers such as Chardin, Maupassant and
Chekhov (with the last being an influence Ceylan would acknowledge explicitly
in his next film). The film was shot with a crew of two and a cast composed
of friends and family members, and it was a marvel.
But with Mayis Sikintisi (The Clouds of May), his second film, Ceylan
seems to say, "Wait! I did the first one wrong." Indeed, The
Clouds of May turns out to be a Kiarostami-style mix of documentary and
fiction (resembling Through the Olive Trees in particular) and it tells
the story of the making of his first film. Ceylan has said that he made
The Clouds of May to atone for his bad behavior while making The Small
Town and to show what his family and village are really like, truths that
he'd suppressed in his over-determined script the first time around. So,
in The Clouds of May, a filmmaker (played by Ceylan surrogate Muzaffer
Ozdemir) returns home to make a film about his family but this time, the
backstory is the story, and the filmmaker becomes a better listener. And
indeed, we find out a lot--an awful lot--about Ceylan's father's battle
to keep a disputed tract of forest land. Along with other actors from
the first film, the turtle makes a re-appearance (and fares much better).
Throughout, Ceylan's own cinematography displays a marvelous eye for color,
composition and detail, bringing the texture of Turkish country living
so close we can nearly smell it. The coup de theatre of The Clouds of
May comes when Ceylan restages a key scene from his first movie, but this
time it's from the point of view of the actors and their own concerns.
A score featuring Handel, Bach and Schubert is icing on the cake.
Having made two versions of the same story in his native Anatolia, Ceylan
moves the action to Istanbul with Distant, along with two of the same
actors who proceed to play similar, if renamed, characters. As in The
Clouds of May, Ozdemir plays the city artiste, here called Mahmut, while
Emin Toprak reprises his restlessly dreaming hillbilly character from
the first two films, this time as Yusuf. At the outset, Mahmut is living
alone in Istanbul, working successfully but unhappily as a commercial
photographer, when the newly unemployed Yusuf comes to visit, intending
to quickly secure a job on a boat. But the city mouse and the country
mouse have more in common than they realize, even as the situation becomes
untenable. Things go from bad to worse as Yusuf struggles to find work
and scares women away while the increasingly embittered Mahmut ponders
his professional and romantic failures. What could have been a dreary
exercise in urban alienation becomes a powerful and moving story about
love and loneliness, thanks to Ceylan's unerring camerawork, the surprising
amount of humor--including an inspired bit about a real mouse on the loose--and
the rich performances of Ozdemir and Toprak. (Sadly, Toprak, who was Ceylan's
real-life cousin, died in a car accident shortly after the film's completion
and five months before he and Ozdemir copped the acting award at Cannes.)
Screen Society's survey of contemporary Turkish cinema wraps up this week
with a single video screening of The Clouds of May at 8 p.m. on Wednesday,
Oct. 20 and two nights of Distant, on 35 mm, Thursday and Friday, Oct.
21 and 22, at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Both films will be in Griffith Theater in
the Bryan Center on West Campus. Admission to the first film is free and
$1 to the second, if you're not a Dukie. Visit www.duke.edu/web/film/screensociety/Arada.html
for more information.
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