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UZAK *****
Nigel Andrews, Financial
Times (UK), 27 May 2004
... So to art, and to the week's best
film. Filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been called the Turkish Tarkovsky.
Poor man. Pace Tarkovsky and his greatness, the Russian was not what you
would call box-office. Being called his heir is like being told you will
turn away popcorn eaters in their tens of millions.
But don't you be turned away. Uzak, last year's Grand Jury Prize winner
at Cannes, is a colossal charmer. In a town-mouse-country-mouse tale of
heft, humour and humanity, an Istanbul photographer (Muzaffer Ozdemir)
is descended on by a young jobseeking relative (Mehmet Oprin Toprak).
The youngster wrecks his not-much-older host's domestic life and disarranges
the furniture of his mind and self-esteem.
A plot, as such, barely exists. To borrow the Seinfeld formulation, Uzak
is a film about nothing. That means, of course, that it is about everything.
It is about a man's near-slapstick attempt to exercise the freedom of
watching a soft-porn video late at night, in his own home, while pretending
to watch Tarkovsky's Stalker .
It is about an invaded householder's terrible, trivial crises of light
control, lock control, mouse-infestation control. (Which add up, by tiny
fractions, to the urgently defended integer of "life control").
It is - for the rural relative - about the wintry, reproachful emptiness
of a job landscape where ships lie at canted angles like surreal paintings
and where snow adorns a city like frosting on a cake he can't taste, eat,
touch or even approach.
Sad and funny, Ceylan's film encompasses the vexations of home-sharing,
the agonies of family loyalty, the vitiating existential vigil that is
unemployment, and the comedy of those everyday domestic dramas that seem
undramatic only to someone too far away to see. Or perhaps to someone
too close to understand - before they knock him off his feet - the potentially
seismic consequences of the quotidian, the accidental, the serendipitous.
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