Distant won three awards at the Cannes Film Festival — the Grand Prix for Best Film and the two lead actors shared the Best Actor Award. It is a truly universal film. Its Turkish setting is just where it plays out, but its machinations and characters could be anywhere and any time in the last two centuries. It also deftly avoids stereotyping Turkish culture as exotically foreign or Near Eastern.
Yet, it also has moments that appear only in great art. There are also two scenes that deal with hypnogogy and hypnopompy. While sleeping, Yusuf sees a small spark of light in the apartment, but falls back to sleep. While watching late night TV, Mahmut sees his tall lamp oddly fall to the floor in slow motion, without a sound. Neither of these scenes has a rational explanation, nor do they symbolize anything. Yet, they could very well be those moments of decision or change that neither character is capable of recognizing in their literal stupor, which masques for their waking life’s stupor. That they are in the film, bits of the irrational in the rational, again shows Ceylan’s maturity in being able to make that Keatsian leap of illogic that works on a deeper reptilian level. Such Negative Capability is the hallmark of an artist who has arrived to a mature phase with great talent.
The DVD was put out by New Yorker Video, and is rather spare in extra features. There is no audio commentary, a theatrical trailer, a long sequence of behind the scenes footage that is just a jumble, not a "making of" featurette. The two best features are Ceylan’s debut short film Cocoon (Koza) and a 35-minute interview with Ceylan. That all of Ceylan’s films are small budget affairs - Distant was made for under $100,000 - and use mainly amateur actors makes his great achievement all the more impressive. That he acts as not only director of his films, but as screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, and co-editor makes that achievement even more impressive.
Distant is a film whose title suffuses the characterization within the film and the feeling some viewers will have toward them, but it does not describe the film itself, for scenes stay with one long after the film ends.
Perhaps the most memorable scene and image of the film comes when Mahmut stalks his ex-wife at the Istanbul airport, and watches her with her new husband as they head to board the plane that will remove her from his life forever. As he watches her, from a distance, we see her catch just a glance of him watching her. Will she leave her husband and return to Mahmut? Not in this film. He pulls back behind a column, and Nazan merely turns her head back to her future. Mahmut is her past, and she knows how to best move on — just keep moving. Mahmut will never get it. Most rarely get such moments of insight into themselves or life. That some viewers will get the film, and that Ceylan gets his own powers of creation, shows that ignorance can teach, as long as one moves about it. Distant does, albeit at just the right length.
Article comments
1 - Joe
The Tarkovsky film that Mahmut watches is "Stalker", not "Solaris". Other than that, though, your review was excellent.