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Odd
Couple in dark apartment in Istanbul
GEOFF PEVERE, Toronto Star (Canada), 26 March 2004
If you can surrender yourself
to the depressive rhythms and largely mute drama of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's
Distant - last year's Grand Prize winner at Cannes - you're in for one
of this year's most satisfying movie experiences. A kind of marriage of
Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Neil Simon's The Odd Couple
- with a little Andrei Tarkovsky tossed in just to keep the pace down
- Ceylan's story of two emotionally isolated Istanbul men thrown unhappily
together is simultaneously sad, funny and ravishing to look at.
The story of an unemployed rural man (played by Mehmet Emin Toprak) who
comes to Instanbul to crash in the apartment of a distant relative (Muzaffer
Ozdemir) while fruitlessly looking for work on the city's wintry docks,
Distant announces its unrushed, isolating world view from the very first
shot: In the distance, a man crosses a field of snow, then crosses a highway
toward us and spots an oncoming car in the distance. The screen goes black,
the credits roll while the sound of a car door slamming is heard, and
when the images re-appear we're in the city.
If the country cousin Yusuf's plight is chilly and hopeless - after job-hunting
proves a bust, he engages in the equally fruitless and ego-crushing activity
of following attractive women around - his cousin Mahmut's condition is
perhaps worse for being willed.
A talented photographer who's been reduced to taking pictures of tiles
for a ceramic company, Mahmut has apparently been living in contented
isolation ever since his wife (Zuhal Gencer Erkaya) left him for another
man.
As unsmiling as an old dog, Mahmut does his best to accommodate Yusuf
but is clearly unused to having his cultivated misanthropy invaded: almost
as soon as he arrives Mahmut stuffs his cousin's overly aromatic footwear
in a closet and - in the movie's most brilliantly deadpan inside-joke
- puts Andrei Tarkovsky's glacial science fiction epic Stalker on the
VCR to hasten Yusuf's departure for bed. Once the utterly bored man retires,
Mahmut pops out Tarkovsky and inserts some porn.
As legitimately heart-breaking as it is funny - it is, after all, a movie
about the utter inability of these two men to reach out to anyone, let
alone each other - Distant is also a breathtaking exercise in formal technique.
Comprised largely of either long takes or slow lateral pans, the movie
lets both time and space suspend its characters in a state of isolation
so great they might as well be floating in separate universes. As much
action takes place offscreen as on, and people are seen as often from
behind as from the front.
A favourite technique of Ceylan (a 45-year-old graduate of Istanbul's
Mimar Sinan University who has made only three features) is to place one
of his characters in focus in the foreground while other figures float
in a blur in the distance.
He's also fond of placing his camera in neutral empty spaces like hallways
and vestibules, or keeping his characters as spatially exiled from each
other as the frame allows.
While not recommended for the jolt-seeker, adrenaline buff or patience-challenged,
Distant is a sublime treat for anyone with a taste for subtly rendered,
almost purely cinematic expression. (If you dug Alexander Sokurov's Russian
Ark, you'll probably like this.) Appreciated on its own downbeat terms,
it's a masterwork.
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