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MEN’S
SECRETS
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker Magazine, 15 March 2004
Nine months have passed since the
last Cannes Film Festival, and we are still reaping the benefits, or,
if you prefer, suffering the consequences. It would appear that the mood
du jour on the sunny Riviera last year was a lightly hypnotized flow of
daze and dread. Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” which won the Palme d’Or, opened
and shut here a couple of months back, Lars Von Trier’s “Dogville” will
shortly be annoying people in a theatre near you, and now we have “Distant,”
a picture so stately and becalmed that its undisputed climax comes with
the trapping of a very thin mouse.
Yet the movie does have strange adhesive powers. From the first shot,
of a man trekking through a snowy field, with the thin white finger of
a minaret poking up in the background, we are on unfamiliar ground. The
film was made by the Turkish writer and director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and
the plodder in the snow is Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), who has been laid
off from his factory job in the provinces and is hitching a ride to Istanbul
in search of better things. He goes to stay with his cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer
Özdemir), and you can tell how eagerly Mahmut is awaiting his kinsman
from the fact that he completely forgets to stay home and let the poor
guy in. That’s the hook: throw together two mopers, well into the woods
of middle age, and see what happens. If this were a Billy Wilder picture,
they would bloom in each other’s company, but this is Istanbul, under
foul and glutinous skies, and what we have is a pair of Walter Matthaus
and no Jack Lemmon.
Mahmut is a commercial photographer, and he would probably class himself
as an intellectual, although in truth he belongs to a lesser, more widespread,
and more entertaining species: the intellectual wanna-be. He has a study
seething with books, and a peppery beard ideal for thoughtful stroking,
but when a friend invites him to a philosophical gathering he asks, “Will
there be any girls?” What Özdemir’s coolly hemmed-in performance suggests
is not so much a mind burdened by the weight of ideas—a staple of European
literary inquiry—as a man who has fewer ideas than he would care to admit,
plus a body aghast at its faltering appetites. There is a beautiful shot
of Mahmut held sharply in the camera’s gaze, stuck fast in ruefulness,
while behind him, out of focus but still readable as a shifting, voluptuous
shape, an unnamed lover removes her clothes. The offer is there, but he
cannot respond, and, after her departure, he sadly seduces himself.
The grief of sexual failure, with its presagings of death, is a subject
rarely touched upon by movies, for obvious reasons. People don’t pay ten
bucks to be warned of their shrivelling desires; they pay ten bucks to
witness two or more flab-free characters writhe seamlessly on creamy sheets,
their approaching bliss invariably signalled by the rising moan of a saxophone
on the soundtrack, as if Kenny G. were hiding under the bed. Contrast
the lumpen Yusuf, glancing at the slit skirt of a woman on the subway
(she catches the glance and moves away), or the childless Mahmut discovering
that his ex-wife is leaving for Canada with her new partner and planning
to have a baby. What is most winning about “Distant,” however, is that
it can peer past the grief and find a scrap of comedy. The two cousins
sit and gaze at Mahmut’s huge flat-screen TV; their choice of viewing
is Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” possibly the least promising film that
you could choose for an evening of family harmony. In particular, they
are watching the infamous trolley scene, in which three taciturn men ride
a clanking railroad into a land of desolation known as “the Zone.” Yusuf
considers this, gives up in despair, and goes to bed, whereupon the furtive
Mahmut waits a minute, then ejects the videotape and substitutes another.
The TV screen is suddenly awash with pornography, as cheap and cheerful
as it comes.
I know how he feels. This is not to disparage Tarkovsky, whose movies
are unmatched in grave remorselessness, but there is no dishonor, whether
we be porno junkies or thriller buffs, in confessing to a lust for sensation.
I saw “Distant” soon after seeing “School of Rock,” and the two pictures
struck me as a flawless double bill, each forcing you to thirst after
the other. “Distant” certainly brims with the anxiety of influence; it
is more than prepared to match the challenging slowness of “Stalker” but
also keen to grub around in petty familiarities from which Tarkovsky might
have averted his eyes—Mahmut cursing at the crumbs of tobacco that Yusuf
leaves on the living-room floor, or driving through a landscape that shouts
out to be photographed but deciding, with a shrug, that he can’t be bothered
to stop. And the moral is: you can keep your brow high, but it’s a hell
of a sweat.
Yet the visions that linger, after “Distant” has drawn to its sensationally
grumpy close, are as startling as anything that Tarkovsky devised in “The
Sacrifice” or “Mirror.” As Yusuf walks down by the docks (he dreams in
vain of a job at sea), the camera follows him patiently through the snow
and comes upon a ship—rusted, half sunken, tilted to one side, and basically
left to die. Yusuf hardly notices it, but it’s like some relic of a forgotten
civilization, or a frozen mammoth. Finally, there is a heart-seizing scene
at the airport, where Mahmut goes to see off his ex-wife without wishing
to be seen himself. At one point, she looks in his direction, but he slips
behind a pillar, like a shadow or a spy, and she is left, as ever, unconvinced
of his presence. If you are pained by a lost love, or you can’t get it
up, or you can never find anywhere to have a smoke these days, or you
simply enjoy shivering and stamping in the winter of your discontent,
then here is the movie for you.
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