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'Distant'
develops close-up of loneliness
Filmmaker's clinical eye yields
deeply human characters
Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News (USA), May 14,
2004
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the 45-year-old
Turkish filmmaker, doesn't deal with overtly controversial subjects nor
does he pat himself on the back for being outrageous.
His is a cinema of quiet achievements and astonishing veracity, and that
makes Ceylan one of the more courageous filmmakers working today.
In a helter-skelter time, Ceylan insists on moving slowly through a scene,
which means he lets us live inside his images. Moreover, he's unafraid
of narrow and emotionally troubling subjects, in this case, the self-imposed
loneliness and suffering of an ordinary man living in a big city.
In Distant, Ceylan makes several references to the late Russian master
of slowness and depth, Andrei Tarkovsky. But Ceylan's interests aren't
as cosmic as Tarkovsky's. Here, he presents a disquieting picture of contemporary
life in Istanbul - and he does it without a trace of sentiment. There's
something eerily clinical about Ceylan's eye, yet his characters remain
deeply human.
The story focuses on Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir), a commercial photographer
whose artistic ambitions steadily have eroded. As the movie progresses,
we learn that Mahmut's mother (portrayed by the director's mother) has
taken ill, that he's recently divorced and that he's unable to connect
to people. He doesn't seem comfortable in his own skin.
Mahmut's life is disrupted when a distant cousin (Mehmet Emin Toprak)
moves into his apartment. Cousin Yusuf has traveled to Istanbul to seek
work, a task that proves increasingly futile. We also suspect that Yusuf's
dream of traveling the world as a sailor might be a trifle naive.
Eventually, Yusuf takes to wandering around the city, watching women,
sitting in cafes, walking through the cold and snowy streets of a city
immersed in a winter that suggests a grayness of the soul. In Istanbul,
he's automatically on the fringes of things. He can't find a way in.
The clashes in Distant are subtle and elusive. A city man has difficulty
accepting his country cousin. More importantly, Mahmut has fallen into
a place where he's no longer able to tolerate others. He has become obsessive
about the neatness of his apartment, sort of a Turkish Felix Unger only
without the comic aspects.
Ceylan's camera loves the long shot. He allows his characters to exist
within a space without necessarily relating to each other. He can say
something about human nature simply by placing his camera in a hallway
and watching what happens.
In Ceylan's movies, slowness is the prerequisite for observation, an approach
that runs contrary to the notion that movies must quicken the pulse.
Although Distant, which opens today at the Starz FilmCenter, may seem
uneventful to American eyes, it quietly reveals much about Turkish society
- from economic crisis to the somewhat alienated quality of daily life
in Istanbul. We know how it feels to walk down an Istanbul street on a
snowy day when a leaden sky refuses to offer even a shred of hope.
When Yusuf makes his first visit to the docks, he walks past a ship that's
stuck in the frozen waters, listing toward the dock. Abandonment and loneliness
pervade that image and the entire film, which builds toward an ending
that manages to be devastating while showing nothing more than a man sitting
on a bench, watching the winter ocean and smoking a cigarette. A ship
sails by.
This is a movie that dares to ask a powerful question: What does it mean
to be really alone? How does it look?
If you can stand the answer, Distant will introduce you to an important,
and, yes, courageous film artist.
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