by Allan Fish
(Turkey 2014 196m) DVD1/2
Aka. Kis Uykusu
Flowers of the Steppes
p Zeynep Ozbatur Atakan d Nuri Bilge Ceylan w Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan ph Gökhan Tiryaki ed Böra Göksingöl, Nuri Bilge Ceylan art Gamze Kus
Haluk Bilginer (Aydin), Melisa Sözen (Nihal), Demet Akbag (Necla), Serhat Mustafa Kilic (Hamdi), Ayberk Pekcan (Hidayet), Nejat Isler (Ismail), Tamer Levent (Suavi), Emirhan Doruktutan (Ilyas), Rabia Özel (Fatma), Ekrem Ilhan (Ekrem), Mehmet Ali Nuroglu (Timur), Fatma Deniz Yildiz (Sevda),
Despite the efforts of Yilmaz Güney in the seventies and eighties, surely no director has so succeeded in putting Turkish cinema on the world map than Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The Turkey we feel we complacently know in the west is a Turkey long gone, the heritage of Anatolia, Asia Minor and Byzantium, of the golden city of Constantinople, of the prized Hellespont and of the Troy brought back from myth by Heinrich Schliemann. In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Ceylan gave us a different Turkey, and he arguably goes further in this, perhaps his greatest film to date.
Aydin is the fiftyish owner of the Hotel Othello in Cappadocia in eastern Turkey. A former jobbing actor for over 25 years, he also owns various properties in the area, but has little to do with the people who live or work in them. He prefers to leave those matters to debt collectors, bailiffs, lawyers and other officials so he can get on with what he feels is important; researching a book on Turkish theatre and writing online articles about everything and nothing and feeding his ego with the sycophants who praise his work in hope of something in return.
This complacency is threatened when, while travelling with his agent Hidayet, a stone is thrown at their van by a small boy angered by how the agent bullied his father into having to give up some of his property – including their TV – to pay debts. When the boy’s father comes to apologise, he still wants nothing to do with the business, referring him to his lawyers. Meanwhile his sister Necla, divorced and returned to live with him, is castigated when she tells him what she honestly thinks of his articles, and his young wife Nihal belittled for her small attempts at philanthropy with an organisation seeking to repair some local schools.
While being as far from our western view of Turkey as could be imagined, the local villages with house not built but rather cut out of the rocks, are much as they may have been in the Minoan age. It’s through its observance that it is most timeless, though, and Ceylan confirms his mastery in every scene. Those who know his earlier work will recognise thematic doffs to Tarkovsky and Haneke, but here there are subliminal echoes of Angelopoulos and Kiarostami. And in Aydin he has a character everyone recognises; hypocritical, self-righteous, patronising and insufferable; a man-child pretending to be a true sophisticate. One moment he boastfully talks of how Omar Sharif, visiting the area on a shoot, told him that acting is all about honesty, the next time he gets in a huff when his sister tells him her honest opinion of his articles about subjects he’s not really qualified to discuss. Another scene goes in detail through a letter he received praising his article, massaging his ego in the hope of help, which he intends to give as he feels this is worthy. Yet one of his tenants asks for help repaying a window and he’s not interested. He’s the man who talks of morals and decency but who cannot see those around him have it in more plentiful abundance. It’s Ceylan’s own honesty – and in the end Aydin’s realisation – which makes the film such a potent examination of pride and blindness to our failings, of how philanthropy is often about self-satisfaction over altruism. It may not be a film to receive plaudits from the Turkish tourist board, but there’s a truthful beauty in every shot, in every performance (Bilginer’s Aydin is worthy of Mastroianni or Ganz in masterpieces past), every cut, that signifies it as the work of one of the 21st century’s true visionaries.
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Ceylan is a personal favorite, one of the rare contemporary directors that give us time to absorb the scenes, making quotidian routines where apparently nothing happens very powerful. Love the use of near-still shots that resemble photographs, the use of weather nearly as a character…
By the way, the man that goes to apologize is the boy’s uncle, not the father.
Quite right, the father Ismail was the one who broke the window with his hand.
This is what I had to say when I watched this in january:
“Fuck. I’m sorry? I guess? I don’t know. I didn’t find the protagonist to be an asshole, the constant “I’m going to finish, but…” that was constant here and there from different characters in the end was mostly a joke but never truly annoying, and whenever it dealt with more silent issues and scenes, it managed to be breathtaking. The rest isn’t essentially bad, or even boring, hell, I’d say this is among the quickest watches I’ve had since I started this 2014 binge (that ends with this movie), but it didn’t move me. While I found identification with the protagonist in certain issues, he is a not-entirely-likeable being, much like any other people that I know from my life, and his struggles and worries while entirely personal to that person, they never truly feel like something that will crumble or have an effect on him, and not that the movie needs it, but the final scenes point to a change of sorts. Or not.”
Don’t really know if I’m keen on seeing this again.
This is a masterful review of a bonafide cinematic masterpiece, one of my favorite films of 2014. The Cannes Film Festival win was no fluke as you most splendidly confirm with your insights into the films artistry. I was captivated by the locations, and how the film beckoned Bergman. Yes Aydin is stupendous and Ceylan is a true visionary. This is his magnum opus.
Outstanding review. This is as a great a film as you make it out to be.
Having been under the spell of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, I have been eagerly waiting to see this since it’s Palme d’Or win at Cannes last spring. This superb review assures me that I won’t be disappointed. As no theaters in my area have been willing to screen a Turkish film that runs over three hours, I am thankful for blu-ray. I have no doubt that Winter Sleep is one of the very best films of 2014.
For all the (granted deserved) hub-bub Once Upon a Time in Anatolia gets, count me as someone who says his Climates from 2006 is every bit the film that the previously mentioned one is. It’s a wonderfully little piece on the disintegration of a relationship as seen in the style of the oxy-moronic idea of ‘small scale epic’. Usual sounds and landscapes that are mundane and hum-drum are given expressiveness and power; it comes in like a whisper, but leaves like a scream, one of my favorites from the Aughts.
Which just says, yeah, this one is great too. Another one from Ceylan where i agree with others, definitely one of the films of 2014. I already want to see it again, and Allan’s piece here, that is bristling with clear admiration, only urges additionally.
One of my top two films of the year.