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A
Silky Sadness
Jonathan Romney, Sight&Sound (UK), June 2004
When ‘Uzak’ won the
Cannes jury prize last year, it was not only one-man band Nuri Bilge Ceylan
who triumphed but also a vanishing kind of personal cinema. ‘Uzak’ climaxes
a trilogy which Jonathan Romney says is a modern masterwork
When I interviewed Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Cannes last
year, overcast skies gave the Mediterranean seafront something of the
morose look of the wintry Istanbul of his latest feature Uzak (Distant).
The Turkish director was personable but clearly tired, having spent the
previous few days selling his film (that is, selling not as in talking
up his work on the interview circuit, but as in being his own sales agent).
Ceylan is about as hands-on as a film-maker can be, financing his own
features, photographing them himself, casting friends and family, drawing
inspiration from his life: a life that, to judge by his indirect self-portraiture
in Uzak, you might imagine to be uneventful. Uzak, Ceylan’s third feature
and a highlight of last year’s Cannes competition, is about two men, one
a photographer, co-existing uncomfortably in an Istanbul flat. Ceylan
himself used to be a photographer, and the flat we see is his own. The
photographs on its walls, however, are not: he removed his own and substituted
those of his sister Emine, who, incidentally, wrote the story on which
Ceylan based his first feature.
Such details and connections begin to preoccupy you once you realise how
tightly circum-scribed are the limits of Ceylan’s fictional world, and
how closely that world relates to his life. Watching the extras on the
Turkish DVDs of his early films, then watching Uzak again, it suddenly
made striking sense to me that Mahmut, the photographer, wears the same
green-and-black puffa jacket Ceylan wore while shooting his first feature
Kasaba (The Small Town, 1998). All this may just be circumstantial anecdote:
no doubt Ceylan uses what’s at hand, wardrobe included, to keep down costs.
Yet such touches say a lot about how personal his cinema is, and how explicitly
he sometimes chooses to signal that dimension.
The closeness between Ceylan’s fictions and life result in a peculiarly
equivocal relationship between the fabricated and the real in his films.
Watching, Kasaba in Rotterdam in 1998, I was struck by a highly aestheticised
realism that registered with microscopic precision the sights, sounds
and rhythms of a particular rural milieu. A powerful nostalgia undeniably
informs Kasaba: this is art cinema at its most delicately impressionistic,
of a kind you thought they didn’t make any more, its dreamlike visual
quality irresistibly evoking such lost remembered worlds as that of Tarkovsky’s
Mirror or Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.
Watch Kasaba alongside its two successors, however – Mayis Sikintisi (Clouds
of May, 2000) and Uzak – and the three parts of the quasi-trilogy resonate
strangely with one another. Together the three films offer a contemplation
of childhood and adulthood, country and city, and present and past, together
with a self-portrait of the director and an enquiry into the use or futility
of cinema itself. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the already
dazzling parts in a way comparable to Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy
(Where Is My Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On…, Through the Olive Trees).
Ceylan’s first two features, and the preceding short, were shot in and
around the village in Anatolia where shot in and around the village in
Anatolia where he grew up (he was born in Istanbul, but his family moved
to the country when he was two years old, then returned to the city eight
years later). His mother and father, Fatma Ceylan and Mehmet Emin Ceylan,
an agricultural engineer, are the grandparents in the first two features;
they were also the leads in Ceylan’s 1995 short Koza (Cocoon), about a
separated couple in their seventies.
Ceylan studied engineering, though his real interest was photography.
“I didn’t think that photography could be a profession,” he told me, “but
when I reached the third class in engineering, I understood I was not
an engineer. But it helped me in the organisation of film-making, maybe
more than film school. I was a film-maker: a black-and-white photographer
from the age of 15.” An admirer of the modernist big guns – Ozu, Bresson,
Bergman, Antonioni, above all Tarkovsky – Ceylan enrolled on a four-year
film-making course in Istanbul but left after two years. He was 36 when
he made his short, having already found success as a commercial photographer.
He has never agreed to work in advertising as a film-maker, “because you
steal from yourself, from your own ideas, when you do that.” The spiritual
torpor of Mahmut, the Ceylan figure in Uzak, suggests he felt bad about
commercial photography too. “Let me say I didn’t feel good about it, because
you have to lie, always. You have to show the goods as better than the
reality. And I don’t like the way of lighting. But I could make movies
with that money.”
There is undeniably an element of artistic sheen to Kasaba, suggesting
the residue of an adman’s look: the silvery luminosity of the black-and-white
photography has a filigree delicacy that adverts aim for when they want
to evoke 1950s art cinema. In fact, Kasaba is anything but a high-gloss
confection – Ceylan shot it with a minimal crew (himself and two sound
recordists, plus his line producer) for the equivalent of $15,000, casting
non-professionals including his parents and cousin Mehmet Emin Toprak.
By financing himself – a practice he has sustained, each film largely
bankrolling the next – Ceylan could avoid externally imposed deadlines.
Kasaba took over a year to make, partly because it involved shooting over
several seasons.
Kasaba is indeed largely about the seasons, an attempt to reconcile an
urban artform with the rural experience of seasonal rhythms. It is also
about children’s awareness of time, change and the adult world, and as
such surely stands as one of the great child’s-eye films. The film is
in two halves, the first an impressionistic view of small-town life, largely
through the eyes of young siblings Hulya and Ali. An extraordinary sequence
at the start shows a village classroom in deep winter. The teacher tries
mechanically to instruct his pupils in the rudiments of social codes but
the children are distracted: by a cat at the window, by Ali’s late arrival
in snowy shoes and socks that need drying on the stove, by a feather that
drifts around the room, its zigzag journey captured in fascinated close-up.
The setting shifts without warning – Ceylan is a master of sudden dislocations
– to spring, to the slaughter of goats, and to a fair where the children’s
older cousin Saffet (Toprak) moodily watches the action. In one remarkable
shot – arguably not without a certain show-off elegance – the seats of
a fairground ride spin round over the young man’s head, suggesting that
the world circulates round him but excludes him: in all three films, the
thick-set, sulky faced Toprak is an embodiment of alienation.
While the film’s first half is a gentle kaleidoscope of impressions, the
second is static to the point of claustrophobia. A family camps overnight
in a field, a tradition in Ceylan’s town at harvest time, and the previously
laconic film is flooded with talk: the grandfather remembers his wartime
experiences in skirmishes with the British; the father, a self-made intellectual,
enthuses about the heroic days of Alexander the Great; factory hand Saffet
broods on his disappointing existence. A brief dream of Ali’s has the
unnerving silkiness of Tarkovsky’s folds in time and space.
Kasaba is dedicated to Ceylan’s favourite writer Anton Chevkhov, some
of whose dialogue – “What can we do but work?” comments the father – is
woven directly into the script. (“Checkhov,” Ceylan says, “taught me how
to look at life – he made me see many details in human relations.”) If
Kasaba evokes the fragmented rural melancholy we associate with Chevkhov’s
plays, then a key Chekhovian theme – intellectuals’ unfailing capacity
for self-delusion – becomes central to Clouds of May.
Ceylan claims, “Uzak is perhaps my most autobiographical film up till
now.” Yet while that is no doubt true of Ceylan as a man, Clouds of May
is very much his autobiography as a film-maker. Here a director named
Muzaffer – played by the memorably sour-faced Muzaffer Özdemir, who briefly
appaears as the village madman in Kasaba – returns to the country from
Istanbul to make a film which will feature his own family as actors; Ceylan’s
parents and Toprak appear again, with a new Ali (Muhammed Zimbaoglu) but
no sister. Ceylan’s real-life line producer Sadik Incesu plays Muzaffer’s
languid hippie assistant Sadik.
Shot in colour, Clouds of May is visually simpler and more stylistically
transparent than Kasaba, yet its starkness allows Ceylan to mount a witty
demonstration of how the earlier film’s ‘naturalness’ was fabricated:
we even see a version of Kasaba’s harvest vigil being shot. Muzaffer is
clearly shooting Kasaba itself, and its production is a hit-and-miss affair,
especially since Muzaffer’s father Emin is preoccupied with the prospect
of losing the trees on his land following a decree by the agricultural
ministry. The prospective arrival of foresters to mark the doomed trees
is the Sword of Damocles hanging over the action.
Clouds of May is bitterly ironic about the filming process, demystifying
both Kasaba and the motivations of its maker. But it also explores the
rural setting in tepdh, returning to certain locations from the earlier
film and giving the milieu a deepening socio-economic reality, much as
Kiarostami did in mapping and remapping the village of Koker in Where
Is My Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On… and Through the Olive Trees.
There are also parallels with Kiarostami’s The Wind Carry Us in Ceylan’s
figure of a disillusioned film-maker forced to retune his citified rhythms
to those of the countryside.
The ‘natural’ delivery of Kasaba’s non-professionals is revealed as entirely
constructed, with Muzaffer’s cast repeating their dialogue as he feeds
it to them line by line. There are egregiously beautiful images – chiaroscuro
shots of Muzaffer’s mother at a window, or close-ups of wind ruffling
his father’s hair. Such touches echo the haunted ruralism of Tarkovsky’s
Mirror yet are implicitly presented as gratuitously beautiful compositions
created by Muzaffer, with their validity as true pictures of this parents
left open to question.
What, in the end, is all this beauty, this fine bucolic sensibility, for?
It doesn’t help Emin, whose agricultural problems his blinkered son barely
registers as he pursues his images. Clouds of May sees Ceylan castigating
himself for the self-absorption his vocation entails: Muzaffer’s desire
to get things right professionally means he gets a lot wrong morally.
Sincerely or otherwise, he offers his cousin Saffet a role in his film,
promising to help him move to Istanbul; Saffet leaves his factory job,
only for Muzaffer, after the shoot, to inform him casually that Istanbul
would never work out for him. Elsewhere Muzaffer and Sadik visit an old
man’s house, apparently empty except for a crying baby. Ceylan cuts from
the baby in its hammock to Muzaffer back on the road; it’s implied the
busy film-maker has left the baby unattended, an irresponsibility he’s
more than capable of.
The sense of a world in which everyone is pursuing their own obsessions,
connecting only incidentally with others, is further explored in Uzak,
which appropriately means ‘distant’. Here the story of Muzaffer and Saffet
is continued through other characters, again played by Özdemir and Toprak.
Mahmut, a photographer living in Istanbul, is visited by his country cousin
Yusuf, who lost his job when his local factory closed; Yusuf intends to
stay with Mahmut only only until he can find a job on a ship. Although
this was not originally Ceylan’s intention, the story is effectively a
thinly disguised continuation of Clouds of May. “This time I wanted to
make a completely different film,” says Ceylan, “but somehow it connected
again. I couldn’t get out of it yet.”
Although it contains no explicit references to the two earlier films,
Uzak introduces a dialectic between the city, where nearly all the film
is set, and the country, seen in the extraordinary pre-credits shot in
which Yusuf slowly walks across a snowy expanse before emerging into the
foreground, to be briefly framed as a loner starkly detached from the
landscape: one of several comparable shots that give Yusuf a pathetic
but imposing outsider status.
Apart from a taped answerphone message – Mahmut is avoiding calls from
his sick mother – there is no dialogue in the film’s first ten minutes
as Ceylan establishes a mood of silence and failed communication that
defines the film’s Istanbul. Mahmut’s flat is a sour single man’s kingdom
where the divorced photographer is visited only by his occasional lover,
a melancholy and apparently married woman who silently passes through
by night. In the flat – shot to look disconcertingly cavernous and soundtracked
by a constant nerve-jangling tinkle of wind chimes – Mahmut and Yusuf
have little to say to each other, barring Mahmut’s occasional testy complaints
about domestic etiquette. Among other things, the film is a wryly comic
portrait of the crankiness of solitary living, as Mahmut obsessively defends
his territory, moves Yusuf’s offeding shoes out of sight, eavesdrops on
his phone calls and worries that Yusuf might have stolen an old watch
of his. In one of the seemingly trivial yet devastating acts of betrayal
and ill-will that run through Ceylan’s films – like the little boy turning
a tortoise on its back in Kasaba – Mahmut finds the watch but doesn’t
tell Yusuf, letting him go on worrying he is unjustly suspected.
Uzak surely shows Antonioni’s influence in its fresco-like images of a
grey, lifeless Istanbul in winter. The film also uses dead time in the
leisurely, sometimes almost subliminally comic fashion of certain Asian
directors – Edward Yang or Sang-soo Hong, for instance. There’s even a
hint of the somnolent wit of Ming-liang Tsai in the priceless three-minute
locked-shot scene where the two men watch Tarkovsky’s Stalker on television:
the studiedly monotonous sequence in which the Stalker’s party ride a
railway truck into the Zone. After a while the bored Yusuf leaves; checking
the coast is clear, Mahmut puts on a porn video.
Little is said throughout: Uzak is a film of missed encounters and failed
communications. While Mahmut omits to say what might be all-important
words of farewell to his ex-wife before she moves to Canada, the shy Yusuf
falls for a woman he encounters in the lobby but not a word passes between
them and the moment is lost. He later follows her through the city, only
to see her meeting another man; there’s something both poignant and intensely
creepy in the way he peers out nervously from behind a bush. (The woman
is played by Ebru Ceylan, the film’s art director and now the film-maker’s
wife; having redecorated the flat for the film, she now lives in it.)
Uzak appears to fizzle out on a dead, inconsequential moment as Mahmut
tentatively tries a cigarette from a packet Yusuf has left behind – though
this suggests a connection of sorts, or perhaps an opening-up of possibilities
(Mahmut has called them “sailor’s cigarettes”, evoking new horizons).
It seems wonderfully subversive these days that smoking a cigarette should
be a positive image – as life-affirming, in its oblique way, as the glass
of water Nanni Moretti drinks at the end of Dear Diary. Yet there’s no
easy sense of resolution here: the key remains determinedly minor.
In its taciturn, appropriately distant fashion, Uzak strikes you very
much as a personal contemplation, even if you don’t know how much of it
reflects the director himself, who has said the film is an accurate depiction
of his lifestyle in the years before his first marriage and after his
divorce. Outsiders can only speculate how much Uzak captures the mood
of today’s Turkish media intellectuals (represented in the film as a sorry
bunch of bachelors, moping about lost ideals and wondering where the women
have got to). Turkish critic Atilla Dorsay – quoted in a recent article
by Nicolas Monceau in Le Monde – sees Ceylan, along with his close friend
Zeki Demirkubuz, who made the much praised Camus-influenced Yazgi (Fate),
as representing a new strain of Turkish film, introspective and psychological;
this strain, the article suggests, reflects the crisis of an educated
middle class losing its bearings and skidding towards materialistic embourgeoisement.
Ceylan’s three features convey an impressive clarity of vision. The path
from Kasaba to Uzak reveals a film-maker whose register is subtly expanding,
with a melancholic moral perspective, a sharp, understated with and a
keen eye for the revealing, ostensibly empty moments of everyday living.
In Uzak Ceylan emerges as an ambitious geographer of city life, exploring
the spaces that irrevocably separate people, both in the street and indoors.
He has two remarkable stars in Uzak : Özdemir, with his initially unsympathetic
drowned-rat demeanour, and Toprak, whose chunkily boyish looks have become
progressively battered in the six years since Kasaba so that by Uzak he
appears every bit as ill used as his character. The two mean shared the
Best Actor award in Cannes last May, Toprak posthumously, having died
in a road accident the previous December. Posterity, I think, will remember
him as one of European cinema’s great lonely presences. ‘Uzak’ is released
on 28 May and reviewed on page 72; the Turkish DVDs of Ceylan’s films
are available online from www.ideefixe.com .
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