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'Distant':
A Turkish Odd Couple
Stephen Hunter, Washington Post (USA), July 23, 2004
"Distant" is a Turkish
variation on the old country-mouse, city-mouse fable, about an urban sophisticate
suddenly forced to live in intimacy with his cousin from the boondocks.
Maybe.
Maybe it's something else entirely that I'm not really smart enough to
see into, but which I sense, lurking somewhere behind the screen.
In the first interpretation, the movie is straightforward, droll, brutally
honest and arresting, if somewhat stately in progress. It begins with
poor Yusuf (Emin Toprak) leaving home one frozen morning in the far, beautiful
but bleak provinces, for the long hitch into the big town of Istanbul.
He arrives at Mahmut's apartment and confidently rings the buzzer. No
answer. Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir) has forgotten that Yusuf is arriving.
Thus Yusuf spends the first day of what he hopes will be the rest of his
glorious life ingloriously: He sits on the curb outside in the cold and
waits and waits and waits. Finally Mahmut shows up and finds him snoozing
in the foyer.
The situation soon clarifies: Mahmut is a commercial photographer, a small-town
boy made good, a womanizer, desperately lonely, an intellectual, an artist
(the apartment could be a professor's) and tried and true in the ways
of the city. He's locked in an affair with a woman who will not leave
her husband for him. Yusuf has lost his rural job (the factory has closed)
and is hoping to find work on one of Istanbul's many steamers or tankers.
Mahmut agrees to put him up until that time, even if the poor schmo isn't
quite clever enough to bring it off.
Basically, that's the movie. One wanders trying to find a life, while
the other hides from life, feeling the intellectual's isolation and perverse
pleasure in despair. Little things get on Mahmut's nerves, as it turns
out; he's become fastidious in bachelor's ways, and he can't really stand
to have his privacy and sense of intimacy violated by a big boob in a
truly ugly sweater. You know where it's headed: When Felix finally leaves,
the garrulous Oscar will, surprisingly, miss him profoundly.
That's what I think. And that's a Western secularist's view, unexpanded
by any spiritual meaning. But possibly there's this other meaning. It's
possible this is a Muslim's denunciation of secular Muslims, who have
embraced the Western lifestyle at the expense of their souls. In this
interpretation, the director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, isn't wryly amused but
furiously scornful. We are meant not to laugh at the fussy Mahmut but
to loathe him.
The evidence for this interpretation is entirely visual: It seems that
everywhere Mahmut travels, a mosque on the horizon (including the great
one at Santa Sofia) seems to mock him. Minarets pierce the air everywhere.
They are a part of the texture of the film. Mahmut is blind, therefore,
to what is obvious to believers, which is the omnipresence of religious
architecture, which stands for the omnipotence of Allah. Possibly what
we are witnessing is the dry, ascetic condemnation of those who have turned
from the One True Faith to the West. The urban character is not only distant
from his cousin but distant from his God.
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