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Space
plus time
Distant gazes at two sides of a bruise-tinted Istanbul
Johnny Ray Huston, San Fransisco Guardian (USA), 28
April 2004
THE LOVELIEST FILM of this young century is also one
of the loneliest, a present-day urban portrait steeped in images of near
ancient architecture and eternal nature. In Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant,
Istanbul's temples, apartment buildings, and crooked streets are framed
by mist-curtained horizons, stacked blankets of post-blizzard snow, and
the churning gray waters of the Bosphorus. One half of the odd couple
at the center of this film is a photographer, but many of Ceylan's indelible
images – a mammoth, overturned ship nudging against the edge of land;
drifts of white powder on trunk-thick tree branches that reach vertically
across the screen – stem from the idle wandering of the other character,
whom the photographer has stubbornly chosen to ignore.
Distant, which claimed the runner-up Grand Prix award at last May's much-lamented
Cannes Film Festival, already dates better than the controversy magnet
that defeated it (Elephant) and a similar hype machine that went home
empty-handed (Dogville). As Ceylan's third feature has slowly journeyed
through the United States, some well-known landlords of taste who dismissed
it have had to second-guess themselves. Covering Cannes, Roger Ebert referred
to Distant as the type of movie in which "grim middle-aged men with
mustaches sit and look and think and smoke and think and look and sit
and smoke and shout and drive around and smoke until finally there is
a closing shot that lasts forever and has no point." This unfair,
monosyllabic (if rhythmic) description refuses to recognize, let alone
contemplate, the film's elegy for an aging, failing male body.
Aesop's fable of the city mouse and the country mouse is given a simple,
resonant reversal in Ceylan's tale of the nonrelationship between young
rube Yusuf (the late Mehmet Emin Toprak, an overgrown, time-torn teddy
bear here) and his older, well-appointed cousin Mahmut (crone-faced Muzaffer
Ozdemir). Fleeing small-town factory layoffs, Yusuf arrives at Mahmut's
doorstep with a dream of becoming a sailor – and seemingly little else
– in his head. The job search quickly becomes an excuse to look at women,
though each girl he notices is joined by a boyfriend or acquaintance the
instant he makes a clumsy attempt at courtship. As Yusuf trudges in and
out of sight, Ceylan's favorite camera movement – a steady 45-degree leftward
pan – usually catches back up to him. The chase sometimes results in two
opposing views of the same bruise-tinted setting, as if Istanbul's sea
and cityscapes were gazing back at themselves.
This tactic suits the standoff in Mahmut's apartment, where what at first
seems to be two well-appointed rooms might, in fact, be different sides
of one. There, Mahmut greets his family member with the grouchiness of
a loner who resents having his habits altered; his pessimistic response
to Yusuf's seafaring plans – "Can you take that kind of loneliness?"
– could easily be applied to his own landlocked existence. A clean freak
(early on, he's seen wiping off his bed minutes after an aborted tryst),
Mahmut is active about trapping the mouse in his kitchen and deodorizing
the odor of Yusuf's shoes but passive when it comes to rekindling a relationship
with his ex-wife, Nazan (Zuhal Gencer Erkaya, who conveys a relationship's
worth of Mahmut's coldness in a passing phrase-and-gaze). Though he fancies
himself far more sophisticated, Mahmut is just as dumbstruck by women
as his cousin; Nazan hovers at the edge of the film trying to drag him
out of his half-life, but he'd rather watch digitized females strut and
disrobe on TV.
Solitary video viewing is a chief symptom of Mahmut's emotionally stunted
condition. At his sister's apartment, when he stumbles on a picture of
a younger, happier self, his first impulse is to flick on the remote.
One of Distant's comic sequences finds Mahmut using an endlessly circling
scene from Tarkovsky's Stalker as roommate repellent so he can watch porn
by himself. (Even when gazing at a typical straight guy's fantasy of lesbian
sex, his posture remains as slackened as a corpse's.) In this regard,
Distant is an ideal bookend for the only recent film that rivals its cinematographic
richness, Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Whereas Tsai fashions
an elegy for the communal loneliness specific to movie palaces, throughout
Distant a television screen is the trash bin Mahmut uses to dispose of
his artistic ambitions and romantic emotions.
Luckily, the director savors the cinematic potential of his willfully
blind protagonist's surroundings. Ceylan's talent for throwing a comic
hitch into a static picture again calls Tsai to mind, but his approach
isn't as arch or campy. He patiently allows life to enter the frame –
shots that initially seem stagnant are invaded by sights and sounds (a
car alarm, a dangling grocery basket), often with comic results – until
a sad story gradually emerges from potent observation. Distant catches
every tiny telltale detail, from the fate of a mouse or a cigarette pack
to one person's split second of recognition and hesitancy before another
person proves once again that he was never there.
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