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Uzak
(Distant) ****
Gordon Ramsay, Times (UK), May 27, 2004
The chills are infinitely sweeter in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s
hypnotic Turkish film, Uzak (Distant). The story is slight, but it’s stuffed
with unspoken thoughts and unspeakable feelings. It charts the subtle
unease between two men from different sides of the track, and it justifiably
won the Grand Prix award at Cannes last year.
Mahmut, an aspiring photographer in Istanbul, is unexpectedly obliged
to put up a country cousin, Yusuf, who comes to town in search of work
in the frozen shipyards. Mahmut is a self-made loner. He has dusted off
his peasant stock. He has refined his smoking habits, and he mixes with
a modest sprinkling of local literati. He spends a couple of days failing
to point his burly cousin in the right direction, and obligation rapidly
turns into inconvenience.
Yusuf is quietly desperate, and clumsily grateful. But as his chances
of picking up a job shrivel to nothing, the atmosphere between the two
men in the flat cools to a lonely comedy of wills, and chess-like games
for space and air.
Muzaffer Özdemir and Emin Toprak are quite brilliant in these edgy battles
for the remote control, the late-night sofa or the ashtray in the kitchen.
The black knowing point is that we have all been on both ends of this
seesaw. The moment you feel for one cousin is the moment you start feeling
guilty for the other. That’s not just terrific acting, it’s terrific manipulative
cheek.
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