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'Distant'
quietly puts life's realities into perspective
Wesley Morris, Boston Globe (USA), 22 April 2004
There are no pleasures, as we know them, in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's ``Distant,''
and that, in some immeasurable way, is pleasure enough. Running at the
Museum of Fine Arts as part of the Turkish film festival, the film is
about sadness, but itself is not sad. It's about loneliness, but it doesn't
leave you alone. The truth is that there is a point in some lives where
the meaning changes completely, or seeps out, like the air in a beach
ball. Welcome to ``Distant,'' the quietest, most candid film in some time
about the small realities that come with a certain age or station in life.
The film opens with a big, wide shot of some snowy landscape. Into the
frame trudges Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), a tall, lumbering fellow who's
been laid off from a job in his village and has come to Istanbul with
dreams of working on ships to send money home to his mother. This guy
must have been a stud back home. He's there not a few hours before he
leans against a car parked in a residential neighborhood, having a cigarette,
in a leather jacket and shades. It's a stance meant for the two girls
walking up the street, though they don't really pay him any attention.
Women tend not to.
Yusuf has plenty of time for ineffectual flirtation. He spends his first
day in Istanbul waiting around for his cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir)
to let him into his apartment. Mahmut agrees to put Yusuf up while he
looks for a job. Forgetting about your housemate is a wonderful way to
begin a new living arrangement. But so go things in ``Distant'' - excruciatingly
awkwardly.
Yusuf is by no means an ideal roomie: He's careless, slovenly, and touched
with more than a bit of sloth. But Mahmut's no prize, either. A commercial
photographer who has toiled his way to bourgeois success, he exhales condescension.
He's a miserable, grizzled, pretentious man, the sort of guy who'll put
on a video of ``Stalker'' by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky to
let a guest know that he's sophisticated. The minute Yusuf has dragged
himself off to bed, ``Stalker'' having sapped him of the will to stay
awake, Mahmut ejects the art flick and pops in some porn.
What a damningly apt slap to intellectual pretension. But ``Distant''
is not a joke on Tarkovsky, whose best films also course with the worry
of lost time. Ceylan's movie has a few things in common with Tarkovsky's
``The Mirror,'' from 1975. If anything, at its most fanciful (which is
not very), it might be Tarkovsky's ``Odd Couple''- a film of domestic
disconnection full of patient, ruminative photography, which is by Ceylan
himself and grows more breathtaking as the picture goes on.
Ceylan has a wondrous sense of how to conjure unhappiness, but he also
has a generous respect for life and the finesse to dam off the melancholy.
He pushes ``Distant,'' which won the jury prize at Cannes last year, toward
neither comedy nor drama in the conventional sense. (The dramatic high
point is a trapped mouse in the apartment.) Instead, the film is overcome
with an expansive ruefulness, a state of mind infrequently put on film,
let alone explored. As far apart as Mahmut and Yusuf are, in matters of
the heart, they're in eerily similar straits.
Mahmut longs for his ex-wife, trailing her to the airport, hoping to catch
a parting glimpse of her before she takes off. Yusuf trails any woman
he fancies. You get the sense that a night in which they'd drunkenly commiserate
about women could save this relationship. But Ceylan's immeasurable achievement
is the way he keeps a true bond out of reach without resorting to tragedy.
There are many inevitabilities of life, he seems to say; loneliness is
just one of them.
Ozdemir and Toprak, who subsequently died in a car accident, shared Cannes's
acting award. The juries at that festival tend to have a beautiful appreciation
for psychological and emotional teamwork. The two don't act in the conventional
sense; they're mood-making harmonists. Mahmut can't be much older than
his early 40s, and Yusuf seems about 10 years his junior. But they live
as though their best years have vanished in a rearview mirror. Americans
take a pill for these sorts of maladies. Ceylan just makes a beautiful
movie.
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