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Uzak
Tony Rayns, Sight&Sound (UK), June 2004
Mahmut, a fastidious, middle-aged commercial photographer,
lives alone in an Istanbul apartment, occasionally visited by his furtive
lover, a married woman. By prior arrangement (which Mahmut forgets), his
nephew Yusuf arrives to stay while looking for work on a merchant ship;
Yusuf has left his village home because the closure of the local factory
has caused mass unemployment. Mahmut is a strict host from the start,
setting various rules for Yusuf’s movements and behaviour in the apartment.
Yusuf quickly discovers that there is no hope of a job in the merchant
navy, but pretends to go on looking for one; he kills time in cafés and
nervously stalks young women he is too scared to approach. Mahmut meanwhile
tries to follow his normal routines (work, get-togethers with friends,
racy videos) but finds himself increasingly irritated by Yusuf’s untidy
and intrusive presence. Mahmut’s ex-wife Nazan tells him that she is emigrating
to Canada with her new husband, and asks him to sign a formal clearance;
she also confides her fear that she may have been left infertile by the
abortion she had during their marriage.
Soon after berating Yusuf for lacking initiative, Mahmut falsely insinuates
that he has stolen a pocket watch from the apartment. At the airport,
Mahmut secretly watches Nazan and her husband leave. When he gets home,
he finds that Yusuf has gone.
***
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the ‘new wave’ directors who appeared in the
mid-1990s in the space left by the collapse of Yeþilçam, Turkey’s Hollywood.
But he doesn’t much resemble any of his contemporaries, partly because
he was a relatively late starter (born 1959, made his first fiction short
in 1995) and partly because his film-making is idiosyncratic and unembarrassedly
old-fashioned. A devotee of Chekhov and Dostoevsky, he outlined his own
project in a piece written for the magazine Cinemaya in 1999: “I do not
like marginal stories. I also do not like extraordinary stories which
happen to ordinary people. I like ordinary stories of ordinary people.”
Uzak (which means ‘distant’ – in the sense of ‘physically remote’, according
to the dictionary, but the association with emotional estrangement is
clearly there in Turkish too) certainly cleaves to the everyday in its
account of the space between two lonely men. Mahmut is a man fast approaching
mid-life crisis: divorced but still hung up on his ex-wife, frustrated
by his tedious job (photographing tile-design) and his guilt-ridden affair
with a married woman, joshed by his friends for betraying his own youthful
ideals, obsessed by the mouse which challenges the anal orderliness of
his apartment. Yusuf, the nephew who comes to stay, is the country hick
Mahmut himself presumably once was: noisily immature for his age, sexually
excitable, clumsy and deeply insecure. When Mahmut finally snaps and bawls
out his unwelcome house guest, accusing him of relying on hand-outs and
connections rather than forging his own future, it’s clear that he’s obliquely
expressing his rage at the state of his own life. The point is underlined
in the film’s forlorn coda: militant ex-smoker Mahmut sits alone on a
seafront bench, under a gathering storm, and lights up one of the cigarettes
Yusuf left behind when he made his exit.
In Ceylan’s previous feature Clouds of May (Mayis Sikintisi, 1999), the
same two actors – Muzaffer Özdemir and the late Mehmet Emin Toprak, joint
winners of the Best Actor prize in Cannes last year for Uzak – played
out a rural but essentially similar version of the gap between an urban
sophisticate and a bumpkin on the make. In that film Özdemir plays a director
(transparently representing Ceylan himself) who returns to his home village
in Anatolia to shoot a film and toprak an academic no-hoper recruited
to act in it.
Uzak seems less obviously close to home, but Ceylan’s film-making has
been avowedly ‘personal’ from the start (his 1997 debut feature Kasaba
was based on a story by his sister about experiences in their childhood)
and it seems more than likely that Özdemir is again playing a version
of the author. It’s no surprise that Mahmut’s mother, heard leaving unanswered
phone messages, is played by Ceylan’s real-life mother. Ceylan, in fact,
looks more and more like a subscriber to the screenwriting method recommended
by his fellow Dostoevsky fan Paul Schrader: identify a personal problem
or issue, create a protagonist who embodies it, and then devise a fiction
in which the problem is tested to its limit.
Does this method work in Uzak? Mahmut is a much less compulsive character
than, say, Travis Bickle or Mishima, and his middle-aged hang-ups are
undoubtedly as ‘ordinary’ as they come. And Ceylan spends more time pondering
the many implications of ‘distance’ than he does getting to grips with
the root causes of Mahmut’s detachment from the world. In so far as the
film has a ‘story arc’ at all, it centres on Mahmut’s growing apprehension
of his own problems; he ends up much more self-aware than he was when
Yusuf arrived, albeit no closer to sorting himself out. The viewer, of
course, is shown both Mahmut and Yusuf (sometimes together, more often
alone) and invited to draw broader conclusions about ‘distance’ from their
behaviour. But the real focus is on Mahmut’s retreat into solipsism, and
it’s a matter of individual taste whether the result seems poignant or
wilfully defeatist.
Credited as director, producer, writer, cinematographer and co-editor,
Ceylan practises film-making as a cottage industry. His casts and collaborators
are generally friends or members of his family. His style, it goes almost
without saying, is committedly spare. He doesn’t use scores, preferring
the ‘musicality’ of natural sound, and formalist rather than dramatic
considerations govern the framing and composition of his shots, both static
and panning. He hasn’t yet achieved the poetry of Ozu’s film language,
or the intensity of Tarkovsky’s, but he’s recognisably working towards
what Paul Schrader once called a ‘transcendental style’. It could be that
the only thing holding him back is his insistence on the ordinary.
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