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Uzak
(Distant)
Marty Northrop, The Philler (USA), 30 April 2004
There is recent Turkish film titled Uzak (which means
Distant) that is, appropriately, about two men who are trapped inside
themselves. Establishing a simple but effective formal technique of juxtaposing
the human subject from bleak surroundings, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan
divorces his human subjects from their austere environments. Although
not nearly as existential as Van Sant's Gerry, Ceylan's film finds its
protagonists nonetheless left without purpose or connection.
Aside from the opening shot of ruralite Yusef hitching a ride away from
the economic decay that ended his job and cast his family into poverty,
the film is set in a distinctly soulless contemporary Istanbul. Naively
hoping to find work or escape as a sailor, Yusef applies to his cousin,
successful artist Mahmut, for a place to stay in the city. Their plot
as housemates unfolds not unlike that of Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple,
had Felix been a discontent and weary photographer and Oscar an ignorant
everyman affecting cool in all the wrong ways. And without the spaghetti
on the wall and minus about two hundred lines or so. And without much
music or any gags (aside from the meak relief of a sticky moustrap subplot
that just barely, but deftly, eases the dull tension between Mahmut and
his boarder). So, I guess not too much like The Odd Couple after all.
Yusef and Mahmut are diametrically opposed. The former prefers broad common
comedy and is amused by a battery-powered soldier toy he bought for a
relative back home, but lacks a mature understanding of where his is headed;
the latter prefers attempting to be stimulated by Tarkovsky but ultimately
caving into the pull of pornography, is not amused by his cousin's childish
demeanor, and sees too painfully well the bleak island upon which the
swells of fate have cast him (and this last sentiment is probably exactly
that which Ceylan directed Muzaffer ?zdemir, who plays Mahmut, to lay
over his face in many sad compositions of the aging photographer mourning
by the harbor or alone in the Turkish equivalent of Starbucks).
Not long after Yusef arrives at his cousin's appartment, Mahmut begins
to be irritated by his guest and the offensive smell of his feet. Their
dissonance is captured with the utmost subtlety, their minimalistic dialogues
seeming all to appropriate for two men who have nothing in common.
The payoff in the film's final act results from a shift in the audience's
perception of each man's motivations. The focus comes to rest fully on
Mahmut, and while I should not spoil the soft but moving closing mintues,
I will note that a story that had appeared to be a drift is, in fact,
given definitive shape. The effect is like studying one of those drawings
that evokes the gestalt principle: from randomness, patterns eventually
suggest meaning.
Ceylan suggests many dimensions of causality for the alienation of Yusef
and Mahmut -- political/economic decline, cultural emptiness, it simply
being the inescapable reality of existence -- while neither emphasising
nor understating any of them, just like how life can be perceived through
any number of emotional or intellectual lenses. I fear I'm beginning to
expose the unsightly superstructure of a ridiculously pretentious "art"
film, but Uzak is seamless beyond reproach, and does not boast anything
it does not genuinely and tastefully accomplish.
And besides, tossing aside plot, Uzak is just as sound formally. In many
sequences, it approaches what theorists giddily refer to as pure cinema:
it accomplishes that which still visual art, music, or literature fails
to accomplish alone. This indefineable power of moving images is perhaps
what compels us to the movies and is what lack of which makes most movies
failures. Uzak hovers there.
It's best seen alone.
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