Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2002 film Distant (Uzak), his third feature film (his first was 1997’s black and white The Small Town [Kasaba]), is a significant step up from his good but flawed 1999 film Clouds Of May (Mayis Sikintisi).
The earlier film had potential, but reeked of a small budget and improvised quality in the worst ways -- plot holes and wooden acting from amateurs. That Clouds Of May succeeded on any level was a testament to Ceylan’s talent as a budding filmmaker. However, Distant is Ceylan’s arrival on the international scene as a great artist, one who has many of the same qualities as other great filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman (although his screenplay is not as dialogue-heavy it is just as brooding, and he lacks Bergman’s penchant for close-ups; his shots are usually long shots for exteriors and medium shots for interiors) and Yasujiro Ozu (whose penetrating scenes of contemplation Ceylan reconfigures).
The bulk of the film takes place in snowy hibernal Istanbul (the fact that it snows in Turkey will likely surprise some), which lends the film a definite Bergmanian feel, as well as reminding one of some of the bleak snowy urban images from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue. The natural images invoke the best of Werner Herzog; as they tend to go on a beat or two longer than standard film theory would dictate, which is what makes them even more memorable, while the urban landscapes range from the nearly Precisionist compositions of Michelangelo Antonioni to the cultural hagiography of Woody Allen. One shot of a bench overlooking water is a direct quotation (read "steal") from Manhattan, save the lack of the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. In another scene, Ceylan similarly quotes a famous shot of a ship in the harbor from Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Yet, like all great artists, Ceylan makes his appropriations his own art, by slightly altering them and keeping them apropos to his own film’s needs.
The story of Distant is not so important as the title, which is very apt. The film follows a lonely intellectual commercial photographer named Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir, the filmmaker from Clouds Of May), who has "made it" in the big city of Istanbul, even though he is still hung up on his ex-wife, who has remarried. She is sterile because of an abortion she had when they were divorcing, likely due to his lack of commitment. He is not a loquacious type, and is somewhat prissy, and one day a younger distant relative of his, named Yusuf (Mehmet Demin Toprak, Ceylan’s real life cousin who died at 28 years of age in a car crash just after the film premiered), shows up from his hometown, and asks to stay with him while he looks for work aboard a ship. The hometown factory has laid him and his father off, and his family is in debt.
Article comments
1 - Joe
The Tarkovsky film that Mahmut watches is "Stalker", not "Solaris". Other than that, though, your review was excellent.