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Only
Disconnect
J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, March 10-16, 2004
Lives
converge but never intersect in an Istanbul of secular alienation and
artistic angst
Distant, the third feature
by the 45-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is a movie of quiet
revelations that is itself quite surprising. Ceylan's exotic Istanbul
may remind some viewers of celluloid Scandinavia—a hushed and wintry world
of secular alienation, broken marriages, and artistic angst.
One of the few hits in competition at Cannes last May, Distant is an unmistakable
art film from an unlikely source. Thoughtfully orchestrated and filled
with visual wit, the movie opens in contemplation of a man crossing a
snowy landscape in the early-morning light; the camera pans left to an
empty road and the figure reappears in the frame just in time to flag
down an approaching car. Cut to an out-of-focus sexual encounter in an
urban apartment, where some time later the first line of dialogue is filtered
through a telephone answering machine.
Distant is predicated on a sense of lives that converge but never intersect.
Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), the man first seen, waits on the street in
a fashionable Istanbul neighborhood, where his presence sets off a car
alarm. He has left his village looking for work and has invited himself
to stay with his older cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir), a craggy loner
who came to Istanbul years ago and has managed to reinvent himself as
a successful photographer. The remote Mahmut is a modern man. He's distanced
from his own feelings, but the title also describes Ceylan's method. The
movie is carefully framed, the camera is more observer than participant,
musical cues are absent, and there are lengthy passages without dialogue.
The emphasis falls on the space between people—and their failure to bridge
that void. The pale light and the constant chill are pervasive presences.
The relationship between the cousins seems elusive, although it is inevitable
that the fastidious Mahmut will grow increasingly irritated with the gauche
bumpkin camped out in his spare room. Actually, city mouse and country
cousin have a few things in common. Both have sick mothers, both follow
women in the street, both are lonely, and both grow to resent each other
tremendously. Mahmut hires Yusuf as his assistant when he goes on assignment
in Anatolia—with predictably negative results. (The expedition echoes
Ceylan's 2000 Clouds of May, in which a filmmaker returns to his Anatolian
village to make a documentary.)
Ceylan several times references Andrei Tarkovsky—Mahmut is seen glumly
watching both Stalker and Solaris on his TV monitor (although he switches
to porn once Yusuf turns in for the night). But Distant is the opposite
of visionary mysticism. Its reserve takes on a hard, gemlike quality.
The filmmakers to whom Ceylan seems closest in his use of repetition and
droll understatement are contemporaries like Abbas Kiarostami and Tsai
Ming-liang, both of whom adapted the old-fashioned cine-modernism of Michelangelo
Antonioni to urban Asia. Mahmut's profession recalls Antonioni's Blow-Up
but is even more related to Distant's autobiographical subtext: Ceylan
was himself a photographer. His mother plays Mahmut's mother, and Toprak,
who also appeared in Clouds of May, is his actual cousin—Toprak's death
in an automobile accident shortly after the movie's completion adds an
unintended tragic dimension to his performance.
A series of incidents in which the presence of a pesky mouse and the disappearance
of a watch take on cumulative narrative weight, Distant does coalesce
into something—but what? The naive Yusuf dreams of going abroad but can't
find a job that will take him there; Mahmut's ex-wife is moving to Canada
with her new husband; the photographer is unable to form another relationship
and is increasingly unhappy with the commercial aspect of his work. Is
it possible to make a rich and satisfying movie about loss and emptiness?
Reviewing Distant when it screened at the New York Film Festival, The
New York Times deemed it dreary; like Jafar Panahi's comparably modest,
deadpan, and artful Crimson Gold, also an NYFF alum, Distant could easily
fail to attract an audience. (Given their geopolitical significance, Turkey
and Iran should be of enormous interest to Americans, but as David Denby's
dim dismissal of the "annoying" Kiarostami some years ago illustrated,
our educated middle class has precious little interest in theirs.)
Distant is mainly political in its existence. Mahmut's obligatory, and
typically ineffectual, airport pilgrimage is an homage to the transient.
People do nothing but disappear from his life. The poetic final image
of the photographer watching a ship pass in the icy harbor is a sort of
burnt offering. Shivering in the cold, he smokes a cigarette from the
pack that his unwelcome houseguest left behind.
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