That this hour and 45-minute long film won Ceylan the Best Director award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival is no surprise. It’s the sort of award that goes toward visual theatrics, and this film is an H-bomb. But, it’s telling that it was not a winner for best film. The Region 2 DVD, put out by Imaj, is a good package. Disk one has the film, in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, but no commentary. It would have been interesting to hear Ceylan riff on the pros and cons of this film. Even a film scholar’s thoughts would be welcome. The subtitles are in white, but given the sepia tone of much of the film this poses no problem in reading. The grammar and spelling errors, however, are another story, and point to a poor job of translation by the folks at Imaj.
Disk two has the extras, including a behind the scenes featurette on the making of the film. This is okay, but lacking any commentary it consists mostly of retakes of assorted scenes. Then there is a featurette of the cast and crew at the Cannes Film Festival, a couple of other featurettes on Ceylan and a Ceylan expert on the film and its worldwide reception, the original theatrical trailer, and a nearly hour and a half long interview program with Ceylan being queried by another Turkish filmmaker whose name is hard to divine. Nonetheless, the discussion is illuminating, deep, and had me longing for such a program to hit American airwaves. Particularly illuminating was Ceylan’s claim that too often filmmakers and artists in politically repressive countries use censorship as an excuse for why their art is so bad and politicized, and lacking in creativity.
Some critics have tried to defend the soap operatic elements of the film on the fact that it is loosely based upon a real life event — the 1996 Susurluk case in Turkey, where innocents got punished instead of the actual criminals, who also were involved in murder and a pay for prison scheme. But, it does not matter to the viewer, especially the non-Turkish viewer.
First, the real life circumstances of the Susurluk case were quite different from this film’s setup; and second, even were they the same, it does not excuse all the melodrama and predictability that abounds in Three Monkeys. Melodrama, incidentally, was originally drama meant to be set to music, meaning that its writers realized that its simplistic narratives needed outside forces to help convey the totality of the scene. This is no slur, as the greatest melodramatist of all was William Shakespeare, and he used the music of his blank verse to help convey much of the import of his best plays. But, they pale next to the ethical and structural complexities of the great Modernist dramatists like those mentioned earlier in this essay, for, drama can stand on its own, sans music’s buoy.
Article comments
1 - Wassim Diab
Dan, really superb review... as usual.
phrases like: ".... They [characters] become more like specimens under a scientific test than characters humans can empathize with as one of our own..." are irreplaceable.
It's interesting how you mentioned Chekhov, Ceylan mentions Chekhov is "always present in his mind when writing a script" (in his interview on Distant DVD). He also admits that writing is the most agonizing part of movie making for him. Obviously that's obviously also his weakest side as a multi-talented artist. I really don't know what he was thinking when he finalized this script and definitely an audio commentary by him would have helped.
A great point you bring: it's not that he won the best director's prize, it's about why he didn't win the best movie's one.
Overall I think only time could prove if Climates or Three Monkeys were the exception to the rule. I tend to think that Climates was a logical progression, especially watching Clouds of May and Distant.