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Grand prix - Best Film
of the Year 2003
The
Price of the Success in Big Town
Atilla Dorsay, Fipresci.org, August 2003
In his new film, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
goes to the big town. His heroes traditionally from the rural area come
to Istanbul in search of new dreams and new perspectives of life. Once
again he has the passion for capturing life in a frame, combining a natural
existentialist approach with the philosophy of a wise man who has put
a lot of faith in nature. His heroes are two distant cousins from the
same little town. One has already been in Istanbul for a while, a photographer
who, with the success of his art, has found himself a small niche amongst
the bourgeoisie. He is selfish - he did not want his ex-wife to carry
his child and therefore gave her all the excuses to leave him. Now he
is alone and when he meets her again, although we know that he still loves
her, it's only to learn that she is going to live abroad with her new
husband. But she is not happy either: because her abortion has definitely
taken away any hope of becoming a mother. And the most affected one is
someone almost outside the story: her new man whose greatest wish is to
be a father... How far can our sins go and affect the lives of people
we don't even know?
In the middle of lonely nights spent alone at home, after a drink or two
in an 'artists' bar', the indifferent watching of porn videos or sometimes
a brief visit of a local whore, comes a distant cousin. He is a total
dreamer. His dream is to find a ship on which he would travel far. But
because of the economic crisis, no-one is willing to recruit a new sailor.
While waiting, he turns into a solitaire hunter chasing all the nice looking
girls on his way. But somehow he always falls on intellectuals who end
up despising him and his desperate innocence. The older relative will
eventually get bored with him and accuse him of the theft of something
lost in the house and even when he finds out that he was mistaken, he
won't tell him the truth, thus obliging the other to leave the house and
maybe the big town. The older cousin has obviously become more and more
bourgeois and has new values now. You can't change your class without
paying for it. The big town is full of lonely lives and to share something
is getting more and more difficult, if not impossible.
Ceylan films an Istanbul of dreams. Caught in the rare white of a snow
storm, it is both breathtaking and menacing, gorgeous and terrible at
the same time. Istanbul seen by Ceylan, both as a director and a cinematographer,
becomes a magic town, with a little old street full of half-abandoned
old houses, the Bosphorus turning into an eternal stream along which the
lonely ones meet. And the human dramas interwoven in the big town turn
into little tragedies. The rhythm of life he captures so well in his semi-documentary
style does not change much. His obsession with nature smoothly moves to
the second rank and big town human dramas take their place instead. He
has his way of telling them, a very economical and cinematographic way
and that turns him into a universal artist, a world director. The very
long shot, for instance, during which we learn everything about the ex-wife,
the child she lost and the new and desperate husband, is a masterpiece
of modern cinema telling.
His film, as usual, is almost without music, except a very timely use
of Mozart. His two main actors do a great job and the fact that one of
them, his favourite actor Mehmet Emin Toprak who plays the young cousin,
sadly passed away, right after the prize he picked up in the Antalya national
festival, due to a tragic car accident, only increases the film's constant
feeling of melancholy. Modest as he was, no-one can imagine how he would
enjoy the acting prize of Cannes, as his colleague, Muzaffer Özdemir did
not even bother to come there, probably because he did not have the smallest
expectation of such a prize. A loss very difficult to replace for Nuri
Bilge Ceylan, whose few main actors are much more than actors, but true
friends.
...................................................................................................................................
The Lonely Wolf of the Turkish Cinema
Atilla Dorsay, Fipresci.org, August 2003
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (born in Istanbul, 1959) was brought
up in the country. After gaining an electric engineer diploma from the
prestigious Bosphorus University of Istanbul, he lived in London, made
long trips (one of them to the Himalayas) and returned home with hundreds
of black-and-white photos. He was first noticed with a 20-minute film,
"Koza-Cacoon" selected for Cannes' short films. His first feature,
"Kasaba - The Town" was shot in black-and-white in the very
town where he grew up, with a team of only two, including himself who
also wrote, shot and edited it. Very small crews and a very artisanal
way of making films would become his trademark. His two following films,
"Mayis Sikintisi - Clouds of May" and "Uzak - Distant"
were chosen respectively for Berlin 2000 and Cannes 2003.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a unique director in the general panorama of the
Turkish cinema. The 'lonely wolf' of the Turkish cinema insists on staying
outside the 'system', writing, directing, shooting and editing all his
films, filming only his family or friends. His is an essentially documentary
style, but shaped and refined with long shots, careful camera movements
and a precious editing which allow the young filmmaker to recreate life
as he sees it in every new film. A constant rhythm and a faithful approach
to reality, but each time with a different taste left in our mouths, a
taste of the turkish cherry, one is inclined to say, thinking of the great
Iranian cineaste whom Ceylan declares one of his masters, next to Bergman,
Antonioni and Tarkovsky. All of his films have had a very positive critical
response. Such as: "An exquisite orchestration of monochrome cinematography
and sound" (Sight and Sound, for The Town), "A miracle of sensuality
and poetry..." (Le Monde, for Clouds of May). " Uzak is in the
tradition of Joyce's urban paralysis, Eliot's Wasteland, the cruel vaudeville
of Waiting for Godot and, perhaps most importantly, the pained silences
and the expressionist, dessicated landscape of Antonioni" (Cinematographer,
for Distant).
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