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Far
away, so close
Mike D’Angelo, Time Out (New York), 11-18 March 2004
Despite its title, which seems
to promise a remote, perhaps forbidding experience, Distant sneaks up
on you. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan lays out his formal strategy in the
film's very first shot: a broad expanse of countryside in which a man
can be seen trudging through the snow, heading in the direction of the
camera. As we wait for him to climb a small ridge, we take in details
of the Turkish landscape, which possesses a hushed, eerie beauty; Ceylan
has chosen this location with care, providing enough visual stimuli to
forestall boredom in all but the most impatient viewer. But it's still
surprising, given the faraway speck this anonymous dude started out as,
how rapidly he's on top of us, dominating the frame. After taking a moment
to look around, he walks out of sight to the left; the camera, after another
brief pause, makes a lateral pan in the same direction, shifting 90 degrees
to take in an equally lovely view bisected vertically by a small, winding
road. The man, however, is nowhere to be seen. A pause. A car appears,
traveling toward us. The man suddenly steps into the foreground, his thumb
extended in what is apparently the universal hitchhiking gesture. The
car approaches. Cut to black.
Now, almost a year passed between the first time that I saw Distant, at
the 2003 Cannes Film Festival (where it won both the Grand Jury Prize
and a shared Best Actor award for its two leads), and my recent second
viewing. And yet I remembered this fairly innocuous shot in almost every
particular: the man's slow progress, the camera's slight tilt downward
to admit the sky above the mountains, the 90-degree lateral pan, the abrupt
reappearance of the man in the left foreground. Comparing movies to paintings
has become a cliché, but it's unavoidable in a film like this one, which
depends almost entirely for its meaning and emotional power on niceties
of composition -- the masterful yet unobtrusive way that Ceylan creates
a pointed dichotomy between foreground and background elements. Depth
perception becomes crucial, which means that Distant suffers badly on
video (which is how I had to watch it the second time, due to a canceled
press screening); it's important that you see this visually sumptuous
movie on the big screen.
But I fear that I'm making the film sound dry and academic and maybe even
pretentious, which does a disservice to its wonderfully droll sense of
humor. The minimal story finds Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak, who was killed
in a car accident shortly after the film was made), the man seen in the
opening shot, traveling from his rural hometown to Istanbul, where he
hopes to find work on a ship. Flat broke, he takes up residence with his
cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir), a photographer and sometime filmmaker
who lives a lonely, fastidious life in a small but lavishly appointed
home. (One of the movie's many sly jokes is that more than half the movie
elapses before we comprehend that what appears to be two separate spaces
is in fact the same room seen from different angles.) Like the first segment
of Stranger than Paradise, Distant captures the petty irritations that
accrue when one person grudgingly opens up his home to a slight acquaintance
or distant relative, though here you're encouraged to identify with both
the exasperated host (who puts Tarkovsky's grim Stalker on the TV in an
effort to narcotize his buddy into bed, whereupon he breaks out the porn)
and the adrift visitor (who's ostensibly seeking employment but spends
most of his time following beautiful women around and trying to summon
up the courage to speak to them).
Still, for all its understated character comedy and sharp psychological
insight, what truly distinguishes Distant is its formal brilliance. Ceylan's
previous film, Clouds of May, played in New Directors/New Films a few
years ago, and featured the same actors in similar roles; the director's
observant eye and knack for the telling detail were already in evidence,
but this new film represents a quantum leap forward. In one respect, Ceylan
simply got lucky (though it's the mark of the first-rate artist that luck
is used to its best advantage): His shoot happened to coincide with one
of the most violent blizzards Turkey has seen in years, and the drifting
snow provides a constant vertical reproach to the horizontal planes that
separate Yusuf and Mahmut from the world, and from each other. When the
camera at long last tracks in for a close-up, the cumulative impact is
almost overwhelming.
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