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DISTANT
James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario (Canada), 19 March
2004
The kind of quiet, poetic film
that has all but disappeared from cinema, DISTANT was widely considered
the best work in competition at the 2003 Cannes film festival, and won
countless awards, including the Grand Prix for best film of the year from
FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics). Turkish director
Nuri Bilge Ceylan rises to the front rank of international auteurs with
this lovely, wounding study of the relationship between two cousins: Yusuf,
an unemployed villager, and Mahmut, an Istanbul photographer who has divorced
his wife and just discovered she is leaving for Canada.
Reserved and artless in comparison to Mahmut, whose apartment he moves
into, the brooding Yusuf comes to the city to look for work, for adventure,
and connection; but he is more similar to his successful and sophisticated
cousin than he realizes. Both are adrift and bereft, lost in solitude,
yearning for the unattainable. (The film’s city mouse/country mouse setup
recalls Chabrol’s LES COUSINS, but Ceylan is less concerned with schemas
of innocence and experience than with parallel experiences of privation.)
Confronted with an unusually cold winter, the director turned it to his
advantage, masterfully employing the swirling snow and glowering skies
over the Bosporus to reflect the two men’s spiritual states. Though there
are many insistent references to Tarkovsky, the film’s meteorological
effects and misty compositions recall Sokurov.
Elegant and reticent, DISTANT is also sometimes funny, with its bursts
of "Odd Couple" insights into the mutual irritation of mismatched
roommates. But its meticulous emotional register and style slowly bear
down to achieve an unforgettable portrait of loss and isolation, all the
more rending with the knowledge that Mehmet Emin Toprak, who plays Yusuf,
was killed in an auto accident the day after the film was invited to the
Cannes film festival.
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