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Death
in Yenice
On the eve of the release of his Cannes hit Uzak, Nuri Bilge Ceylan tells Fiachra Gibbons why his leading man had to be awarded the festival's best actor gong posthumously
Mehmet Emin Toprak had the face
of a beautiful brute, a rough country boy, restless, vulnerable, lost
and somehow fated to be crushed by the big city. For the past seven years,
this factory worker from a small dusty town in western Turkey had given
an almost magical depth to the films of his cousin Nuri Bilge Ceylan,
one of the most remarkable film-makers in the world at the moment. The night before Toprak died, Uzak had been accepted for Cannes. He had just got married and promised his bride they would honeymoon on the Croisette. Despite the excitement, he decided to drive home through the night to Yenice, rather than spend another day with the swells at the Ankara film festival. He was also itching to test his Tofas, a Turkish version of a 1980s Fiat, on the seven-hour trip. When they got back to Yenice, on the edge of the old plain of Troy, he decided to take his exhausted wife home first before dropping off his friend. On the way back he must have fallen asleep. "It wasn't a big crash but it was enough to kill him," Ceylan recalls. He lights another cigarette. "I don't like to go back home to Yenice anymore. I feel so bad, so guilty. I don't know what to say. His wife will survive, she is young, but his parents will never recover. His father has dreams - he says he comes back and speaks to him in the night." It is the kind of story Ceylan could make into one of his quietly elegiac films about the gulf between the city and the country. In three delicately crafted instalments, Ceylan has used his family to explore the loss of something precious in the inexorable migration to the smoke. But Toprak's death is part of their history Ceylan cannot bear to mine. "I want to forget," he says. We are talking in his Istanbul flat, where most of Uzak was shot, amid a wintry Himalayan landscape of old apartment blocks. His heavily pregnant wife, Ebru, who is also in the film, lounges on the sofa in a pair of woollen village slippers. Looking around you can't help remembering scenes, and, inevitably, the presence of the brooding, nervy, young Toprak - getting in the way of his sullen photographer cousin who wishes he would go back to the village and leave him to wallow in existential gloom. Ceylan makes no bones about the fact that the photographer, played by an architect friend, Muzaffer Ozdemir, who shared Toprak's posthumous best actor award, is a cipher for himself, guilty about the way he uses his country cousins and disillusioned by the emptiness of his relative success. Ceylan has never strayed far from home in his films. His first two were shot in and around his childhood home in Yenice, with his family and neighbours playing themselves or other members of the extended clan. In the beginning, Ceylan claims he was unsure of his ability to cast actors - the fear of messing up was far greater than the fear of spectacularly falling out with the folks. "I didn't know what I was doing. My parents are country people, very good-hearted. They thought it was just another of their son's stupid ideas, but they could see I needed help so they went along with it." In Kasaba, a sublime masterpiece of quiet storytelling, we find the Ceylan family sleeping in the fields during the corn harvest, reminiscing and dwelling over old rancours. Ceylan's father, a retired agricultural engineer, plays his own father, who fought the British in Mesopotamia and was taken as a prisoner to India, where most of his comrades died of overwork or disease. "When my grandfather returned years later (by which time the Greeks had invaded), his wife assumed he was dead and was engaged to marry another man." They tell stories to amuse themselves, and gradually the ghosts of modern Turkey's first painful century, and of those who went away to the city, come back to haunt them. This was the first time Toprak had appeared on screen, playing the restless son of mad uncle Muzza, who once got a taxi all the way to Ankara, then ran off without paying. After another escapade to Istanbul he was never heard of again. "Everyone knew the stories so it was quite easy for them to act them. I don't think they thought much would come of it ... For a while it was like I had never gone away. The moment you leave home it is never the same ... But for those days when we were sleeping out in the fields the family were together once more." In Clouds of May, Ceylan turned the camera on himself, the parasitic film-maker. His parents played themselves while his alter ego, Ozdemir, skulked around their house eavesdropping on their conversations in bed, and imposing his script on the neighbours he wanted to use, rather than listening to their own more interesting tales. "When I looked back on making the first film I didn't lke myself," Ceylan insists. "I wanted to show the bad things about being an artist, the way we quite casually exploit people." Uzak, his third film, which also won the grand prix at Cannes, means "distant", and Ceylan feels that distance from his roots and youthful idealism acutely. "My guilty conscience is one of my main motivations. As a city person when you go to your home town, you think their generosity is your right. When the situation is reversed, and they come here to Istanbul it is not quite the same. I see this very clearly and that is what Uzak is about." Yenice sits in an idyllic landscape, low hills of chestnut, pine and olive trees, flower meadows and maize fields - the kind of place the young were forced to leave in their thousands after Turkey's economic collapse in 2001. In Uzak, Toprak plays one of their number who is thrown on to the grudging hospitality of his photographer cousin (whose cack-handed attempts at film-making are witnessed in Clouds of May) living the isolated life of a successful artist in the city. "I have so many friends like that, who started out with such hope and talent, but now in their 40s find themselves quite lonely and isolated from the places where they live. It is my story too. As you get older and richer you lose your sensitivity. You touch a table but you don't feel it. It is a problem of cities." Of course, the young and idealistic Ceylan could not wait to get away to Istanbul. Eventually he washed up in London, after doing an engineering degree, working as a waiter in a Greek restaurant in Brixton when the riots broke out in 1981. It was as chaos reigned outside that a chance impulse changed the course of his life. "For
months I had been dreaming of going to the Himalayas to take photographs
and find the meaning of my life. As the riots started and people started
looting the shops, I couldn't get off work quickly enough to rush to this
photography shop I had my eye on. But by the time I got there everything
was gone. So I went into Boots and took lots and lots of Kodacolor film.
With that film I was able to go to India, where every day I would sell
a few rolls to tourists, and where I finally decided to try to make films.
So I would like to thank the people of Brixton, particularly all the white
guys, who did most of the looting, for breaking the windows for me, and
for helping me to become a director. It was such a joyful riot, and to
me very funny compared to Turkish ones. Even as they were attacking the
police, someone set up a sound system to play I Shot the Sheriff. I liked
that - thank you Brixton." · Uzak is screened tonight at the NFT, London SE1, and goes on general release on May 28. The Kasaba, Clouds of May and Uzak trilogy are also be released as a boxed DVD set by Artificial Eye.
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