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Uzak
*****
Peter Simmonds, Teletex (UK), 27 May 2004
Turkish
film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's sombre, bleakly comic drama comes with
quite a pedigree, having won the Jury Prize and Best Actor award at Cannes
2003. Quite right, too, this is a miserablist masterpiece.
Divorced
and cynical, commercial photographer Mahmut lives alone in his spacious
Istanbul apartment. His quietly regimented solitude is disturbed when
his relative Yusuf arrives from their rural hometown to look for work.
Yusuf struggles to find his feet in the big city, especially as his search
for merchant navy work proves futile, and his slovenly ways and clod-hopping
demeanour become an increasing source of annoyance to Mahmut.
That's about it really, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a static
non-event, Uzak's beauty is in its detail. The title translates as Distant,
and both its protagonists are far from their roots and, for differing
reasons, alienated from their environment and each other.
The men are opposites — urban Mahmut is shut off, ignores calls from his
ailing mother, prefers films to human interaction and has a joyless sexual
affair with a married woman. By contrast the naïve Yusuf guiltily uses
Mahmut's phone to check up on his family, hopelessly chases after work
and longingly tracks pretty women. Mahmut has everything Yusuf yearns
for, but holds it all in contempt.
At one point a dejected Yusuf looks at two dishes of freshly caught fish
on the harbour. One is full of water with living fish, the other is dry
and full of dead fish. Stranded between the two a lone fish thrashes on
the ground. This is the position of both men, struggling on the outskirts
of both the public and private worlds, stranded between life and death.
From the opening shot, Uzak is stunning to look at, full of striking compositions
and contrasting colour palettes, from the snowy (almost Muscovite) Istanbul
to the faded Ottoman grandeur of the Turkish provinces.
The soundscape is equally striking. There is no music and the film is
wordless for vast sections — wind chimes, the horns of passing ships and
ambient sound form the aural landscape. Solitude is the film's theme and
to explore this Ceylan uses silences and pauses to with a precision and
skill that would put Harold Pinter to shame.
Ceylan, recently christened the Turkish Tarkovsky by Sight And Sound,
is a film-making phenomenon. Not only did he direct here, he wrote, produced,
edited and photographed to produce a singular, intense vision which it
is doubtful he could have achieved had he shared the labour.
Beautiful, accomplished film-making from a rising star of world cinema.
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