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Nuri
Bilge Ceylan delivers masterpiece of loneliness with 'Uzak'
Ali Jaafar, The Daily Star (UK), June 26, 2004
Turkish
director's films create refreshingly intimate self-portrait
LONDON: It is a measure of
the quality of Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan that he has already
been granted a dedicated season at London's prestigious National Film
Theater despite having only completed three films. His latest feature,
"Uzak" (Distant), just released across the UK, marks the final
part of a trilogy beginning with 1998's "Kasaba" (The Small
Town) and 2000's "Clouds in May," and was awarded the Grand
Prix at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
Uzak tells the story of Mahmut, a reasonably successful if disillusioned
photographer living in Istanbul, who is visited by his relative Youssef,
recently made redundant from his factory job in Mahmut's home village
and who dreams of landing a job in the big city on a merchant ship. Generally
eschewing any major plot twists or dramatic narratives, the film instead
focuses on the fractious nature of the two men's relationship, in so doing
creating an unexpectedly moving portrayal of loneliness and unfulfilled
dreams.
Writing at the beginning of his career in 1999 in the Turkish magazine
Cinemaya, Ceylan categorized his own cinematic vision by saying: "I
do not like marginal stories. I also do not like extraordinary stories
which happen to ordinary people. I like ordinary stories of ordinary people."
His insistence on the ordinariness of his characters fails to do justice
to the simple power he is able to achieve visually and cumulatively throughout
"Uzak." There is unlikely to be a more beautiful sequence in
cinema this year than in the opening minutes of the film, where the solitary
figure of Youssef leaves his village, the tiny dot of a man in the background
eventually emerging from a sea of snow and all consuming whiteness to
fill the camera with his youthfully mournful gaze as he takes a last look
back at his hometown. This motif of snow and ice runs through the film,
with the bleak mid-winter of Istanbul symbolizing the main characters'
isolation from each other and the world around them.
Another memorable scene sees Youssef trawling through the city's port
in search of a job, only to come upon a ship overturned in the harbor,
the futility of his endeavour starkly made clear with the sight of the
now-useless ship broken and covered in snow. "There's no economic
crisis at sea," Youssef hopefully tells the ever cynical Mahmut at
a point in the film. But the sad truth is the characters are ultimately
doomed to remain land locked, unable to escape the mental and physical
straightjackets life has given them.
Ceylan is the consummate auteur, serving as the editor, writer, director
of photography and producer on all his films, and there is no doubt that
"Uzak" is a highly personal film. The figure of Mahmut is, in
many ways, the director's alter-ego, played by the actor Muzzafer Ozdemir,
who also played the role of the director in Ceylan's earlier "Clouds
of May." Throughout his trilogy, Ceylan has employed friends and
family. In "Uzak," for example, the role of Mahmut's mother
is played by Ceylan's real life mother, just as she played the protagonist's
mother in "Clouds of May." Mahmut's apartment in "Uzak"
is similarly Ceylan's own apartment in "Uzak." The result of
all this is to create a refreshingly intimate self-portrait of Ceylan,
and the three films come together to form a contemplation on childhood
and adulthood, the present and the past, the gap between city life and
rural life, that will undoubtedly join the premier league of world cinema,
along with the likes of Antonioni and Tarkovsky, of whom Ceylan is a self-professed
admirer.
It is in the world-weary figure of Mahmut that the film finds its suitably
dislocated center. One of his friends accuses him of "mourning your
death before it happens," and this sense of emptiness inflects the
character's every step. Having coffee with his ex-wife as she tells him
of her plans to leave Turkey with her new husband, Mahmut is unable to
tell her he still has feelings for her. Later, he follows her to the airport.
Rather than tell her finally how he feels, he watches her from a distance,
making sure she doesn't see him until she finally reaches the boarding
gate and leaves his life forever. He stares on silently, passively, a
voyeur in his own life, a casual witness to another crushing disappointment.
Ceylan creates a world in which alienation is infectious and all pervasive.
Youssef, though invested by a youthful enthusiasm Mahmut seems to have
lost decades ago, develops a crush on a pretty neighbor. At first what
seems like an innocently hesitant flirtation ultimately leads to yet another
of life's unspoken defeats as he follows her through the streets of the
city, patiently waiting for an opportunity to speak to her, only to see
her end up in the arms of another man. It is no coincidence that Ceylan
surrounds these two figures with unobtainable images of happiness, such
as people joyously having snowfights or lovers walking hand in hand, while
they remain cast adrift on their islands of isolation. The director neatly
sums up their plight with the image of a freshly caught fish slowly flapping
against the ground, alone, caught between two trays of water, the air
inexorably escaping its lungs.
Ceylan has remarked on the importance of Anton Chekhov to his work, even
dedicating "Kasaba" to the great Russian writer. In that film
he directly interwove some of Chekhov's dialogue into his screenplay.
But in "Uzak" it is the absence of dialogue that is most profound.
Mahmut ignores messages from his sick mother, and later his sister chiding
him for not visiting their mother, now in a hospital. Similarly Mahmut's
liaison with a married woman is characterized by its wordlessness, devoid
of any romantic frisson, a physical act seemingly designed to stave off
the dreary boredom of both characters' lives.
But for all this overpowering melancholia, the film is not without humor.
At one point Mahmut, believing Youssef to have gone to sleep, watches
an adult movie only to have to frantically search for the remote control
when the young man re-emerges to look for a magazine. There are moments
when they seem an existential incarnation of "The Odd Couple,"
so memorably performed by Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. Mahmut repeatedly
admonishes Youssef for his messiness and for smoking around the house.
When Youssef finally leaves Mahmut's apartment, the older man discovers
a pack of his departed relative's cigarettes. In a wonderfully subtle
moment, we see Mahmut smoking the cigarettes, sitting on a bench looking
out to the sea. This ordinary action by an ordinary man is suddenly invested
with an extraordinary resonance, a rare moment of connection between the
two characters, silently expressed yet all the more poignant for it.
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