Kiş Uykusu

Director/Coscreenwriter: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

By Roderick Heath

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has steadily gained a select and growing circle of international film devotees since his debut in 1998 with Small Town. His last four films have won prizes in the Cannes Film Festival, 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia brought him a far wider level of acclaim, and this year’s Winter Sleep captured the Palme d’Or, cementing his reputation as one of the age’s major filmmakers. For fans of Anatolia, Winter Sleep may prove to be a subtly dissonant experience. Extreme length and a vivid mood connect them. But where Anatolia was a stark, eerie work where conversation and human connection were as scarce as houses in the blasted plains of central Turkey, essayed through a rarefied mix of utter realism and poetic contemplation, Winter Sleep is closer to Ceylan’s earlier efforts, as it’s a novelistic work where the loquacity of the characters pointedly contrasts the taciturn men of the previous film. That’s not so much a criticism as a point of reference, for Ceylan’s gift for situating stories in very specific climes that are nonetheless readily recognisable, universal portraits of humanity is still palpable, and he captures that specific sense of place with longing and desolate romanticism. Whereas Anatolia was a film about exposure, as its policeman and functionary protagonists wandered the vast plains searching for a dead body, Winter Sleep is a tale of homes and refuges, albeit one that notes how a bedroom can become as wintry and alienating as King Lear’s blasted heath.

Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) is a middle-aged former actor who now runs a hotel in the rocky region of Cappodocia, a tourist hot spot in the summer because of its spectacular scenery and the fascinating local tradition of building houses into the rocks. But it is also a place of chilly, oppressive winters and depressed conditions for many of the inhabitants who aren’t benefiting from the economics of tourism. The film opens in the last wane of the tourist season, and the only guests now at the hotel are a Japanese couple and a motorcycle-riding wanderer, Timur (Mehmet Ali Nuroglu), who’s interested in the possibility of riding a horse whilst staying at the hotel, as promised by pictures on the website. Aydin apologetically explains that the pictures were just for visual impact, but then he does discuss obtaining a horse for the hotel guests to ride and hires a wrangler who promises to capture one of the wild horses that live in the valley below. Aydin’s energies are scarcely demanded by all of his interests, delegating them to assistants and family, giving him considerable time to pursue a significant project in his mind, a history of the Turkish theatre. But he procrastinates with a sideline he loves, writing “The Voice of the Steppes,” a column for a regional newspaper in which he can pontificate on any subject he desires. Aydin lives with both his sister Necla (Demet Akbag), who’s recently divorced her alcoholic husband, and his wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen), who, being much younger than her husband, is beset by the boredom and isolation of the hotel and has made herself useful running campaigns and soliciting donations to improve the local schools.

Besides the hotel, Aydin is a landlord, owning many houses in the nearby town of Garip. Aydin’s troubles begin when a stone crashes into the passenger side window of his jeep when he’s being driven through the town by his manager Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan). The rock was thrown by a kid, Ilyas (Emirhan Doruktutan), who runs off but falls in a pond. Hidayet fishes him out, and he and Aydin take Ilyas back to his father, Ismail (Nejat Isler), who is one of Aydin’s tenants. Ismail is unemployed after a spell in jail, and is now well behind on his rent. Aydin’s agents had seized some of their property as payment, including their refrigerator and television, and also possibly manhandled Ismail in the process. Ismail slaps his son in the face for his act, but then punches in one of his own house’s windows, and almost attacks Hidayet in a fury, held back only by his brother, Hamdi (Serhat Mustafa Kiliç). Hamdi is an imam, amiable and personable–perhaps a little too much so. He tries to act as interlocutor with Aydin and broker an arrangement to keep the peace, but he proves hapless as he offers to pay for the repair of the car window, only to learn it’s excruciatingly expensive for his poor family’s finances. To even make such an approach, Hamdi has to walk the 10 kilometres from town. Aydin, for his part, rather than being pleased or understanding about such efforts, takes veiled potshots at Hamdi in his column, complaining about badly dressed, rundown imams who stick their nose in other people’s business.

Like Asghar Farhadi from Iran, another paragon of the new Middle Eastern cinema, Ceylan tips his hat to artistic traditions of Europe and Russia as well more parochial ones, and makes a very literate, not merely literal movie. The great Russian authors of the 19th century are clearly a major influence on this work, particularly Anton Chekhov, whose wryly observed, ultimately tragic tales of ordinary oppressions and disappointments are an official inspiration, as well as Ceylan’s favourite film masters, including Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson, with whom he shares an unfashionable yet powerful fondness for deep, meditative tales digging into psychological and sociological matters. Aydin is the kind of character Chekhov and Ibsen particularly enjoyed, if that’s the word—a pompous, self-appointed master of the world who quietly grinds down the people around him, though Aydin isn’t quite such a pillar of monstrous egocentrism as some of those writers’ protagonists are. Initially, Aydin seems like a quietly industrious, but world-weary, henpecked intellectual whose prosperity is merely resented, but we get an eyeful of just what a shit he can be when Hamdi brings Ilyas to see him and apologise, as with smarmy delight, Aydin holds out his hand for Ilyas to kiss. Ceylan’s portraits of contemporary society out in the Turkish boondocks do indeed seem to justify the likeness to Victorian Russia, glimpsing a country riddled with uncomfortable extremes, where a prosperous urban class has partly annexed remnants of power and position and expected deference once reserved for the aristocracy, cheek-by-jowl with people trying to subsist.

Ceylan’s eye for physical context and cinematic atmosphere, which dominated in Anatolia, is more muted here, but just as crucial. He introduces Aydin wandering in the dawn light amongst the crags of the landscape, and returns to the motif, viewing Aydin ironically and consistently as a man exiled from his own home in spite of his nominal security and mastery. This impression is made literal when Nihal asks him to leave whilst she holds a private meeting of donors and interested parties to her school project, leaving Aydin wandering without, gazing in pained jealous at the warmth of the interior and the place Nihal has gained for herself in a niche that doesn’t involve him. Early in the film, the wrangler Aydin hires captures a wild horse, which stumbles into a canal and has to be hauled out in a gruelling sequence. The animal is stowed in a cave near the hotel, where Aydin visits it in the darkness of early dawn, the animal a boding presence of shackled, incomprehensible wildness under his house, encapsulating all the violently contradictory feelings starting to burst forth in Aydin’s little world. At first, this seething seems aimed at Aydin from out in the world, crashing in very solid form as Ilyas’ rock against his car, but soon becomes palpable in his house.

A revealing early scene sees Aydin consulting with one of his friends, the bearded and contemplative Suavi (Tamer Levent), and calls in Nihal to give her two cents as well, on the subject of an email he’s received asking for his help lobbying for a specially built sewing hutch for local women. Nihal reacts with scarcely concealed contempt and anger that Aydin hasn’t done a damn thing to help with the local schools that badly need upkeep, but responds to a flattering email into helping with a scarcely necessary project. What gives Winter Sleep it subtle propulsion is the way each scene opens a gate into the next, as this scene presages Aydin’s subsequent encounters with Necla and Nihal, which reveal the household to be no paragon of domestic tranquillity. Early on, Necla mentions to Aydin that she liked his latest column, but as he begins to expound on subjects beyond his usual ken, and particularly as he indulges critical pot shots at Hamdi, Nacla chafes. Finally, during their familiar evening scene when she reclines on a lounge behind him in his office, she unloads, pouring suspicion and scorn on his pretences to punditry and suggests he takes stances he thinks will make him popular or save him from really taking a position: as she notes, he pours scorn on the faithful for their naiveté and distrusts the irreligious for their lack of commitment. Aydin fires back that he understands why she got divorced; clearly her husband couldn’t take her venomous tongue anymore. Indeed, Necla does seem to be taking her feelings out on Aydin a little, in part because earlier he sceptically responded to her wistful thesis of shaming wrongdoers into right action by asking for their forgiveness, an assumption of sin and mode of passive resistance.

Later, Aydin intrudes upon a meeting of Nihal’s school donors and encounters Levent (Nadir Saribacak), a teacher with a wry streak who enters murmuring that he’s just visited the local army base: “These military types pretend to love their wives in public,” Levent notes, “But if they had the chance they’d put them in sacks and dump them in the river.” Aydin is quietly ruffled as Nihal tends solicitously to Levent, and then goes morose when Nihal asks him to leave. Aydin retreats to his office where, in a droll jump cut, he’s pictured sitting at his computer with a long-nosed mask on, a vision of sullen rejection. After Nihal’s meeting is over, he makes a play of concern about the state of her records of the donations she’s received and the trustworthiness of the donors, stating that any scandal might affect his own good name, but actually, obviously just trying to insert himself into her business. “Your altruism moves me to tears,” Nihal comments acidly, and it becomes clear that their marriage has only been technically sustained for a couple of years now by his promise to let her have this salving venture to herself. The film’s centrepiece arrives in a chain of epic, melancholy exchanges between husband and wife, in the classically Bergman-esque mode of tearful truth-telling by wintry firelight a la Hour of the Wolf (1968). Nihal condemns Aydin for his intrusive egotism but also herself for her cowardice in remaining married to him to avoid the cruelty of surviving alone in the big world. Aydin goes through a big show of collecting up Nihal’s records and papers to inspect, retreats to his office and, realising he’s made a major tactical error, returns them, confessing he’s too lazy.

One of the best qualities of Winter Sleep is its sensitive mixture of the utterly humdrum with the majestic, the slow-burning intensity of its humans turning minor bugbears and petty conflicts into spurs for major crises, and their tethering to a landscape that both ignores them and inflicts realities upon them. Where Anatolia depicted the aftermath of murder, the heat of the moment long left behind and only the chill of a dead body and destroyed lives noted, Winter Sleep avoids even that much melodramatic cue. People in this film are smouldering, cramped, and aching with mostly self-imposed frustration and anger and sorrow. Aydin’s lack of interest in the property that sustains his situation is indicted as part of the problem rather; he has scarcely any concept of how enforcement of his proprietorial interest has left the already desperate and disenfranchised Ismail even worse off—and of course, this is the sort of iniquity that happens every day anywhere. However, Ceylan and his coscreenwriter, his wife Ebru, are careful not to make Aydin a monster; although his thoughtlessness and position of economic power are definitely destructive, he is just as hapless as the people who would like to blame him for all their problems. Aydin, aging and greyed, seems to yearn to dissolve into the landscape at some points, and his pretences hide his anxiety over the final wane of the abilities and attributes that have allowed him to make his life. Not that the Ceylans indulge his self-pity either or the usual shallow psychology of suffering: during his argument with Nihal, when he begins a spiel about his upbringing in a poor town without electricity, Nihal interrupts him by telling him he’s not playing a role anymore.

Many of the characters uphold, or try to uphold, a distinct philosophical viewpoint, but for the Ceylans, this is not so much philosophical work as a depiction of characters wrestling with the gap between their gift for reason–that is, their humanness–and their inability to make it work in their lives. Some have criticised this aspect of the film, and yet the discussions reminded me acutely of real-life versions I’ve engaged in, stews of words and impulses mixed together in yearning toward a coherent sense of meaning, inflected with the peccadilloes, humour, and competitive spirit of the people engaging in them. Necla and Aydin’s argument over her ethical ideas lays down a basic dichotomy, with Necla upholding a vision of forgiveness and accepting responsibility for another’s faults that could create a firmer connection of common feeling and thus perhaps heal, whilst Aydin ripostes with questioning whether the victims of Nazis should therefore have apologised to their persecutors. Necla never gets around to trying to put her thought into action, but is clearly tormented by the idea that in leaving her husband, she abandoned him to worsening alcoholism.

Aydin doesn’t have an actual intellectual or ideological position. The Ceylans cunningly use him to exemplify something all too common in the contemporary world, a person with pretences to being a thinker who nonetheless has only a series of ideas he’s rejected, bugbears to complain about, and fashionable causes to trumpet, rather than an actual set of concepts and ideals to be coherently expounded. Indeed, the figure of a blowhard pontificating on the internet is hardly relevant only to Turkey. Finally, Nihal is the one who actually tries to put an ideal into practice, but this works out in a different manner to how she expects. “A life that’s all mapped out isn’t real,” the motorcyclist states simply but with unshakeable authority, though his way is pointedly lonely, an existential cowboy passing through the lives of these domesticated ethicists. Aydin finally begins to look like an avatar for the divided state of modern Turkey, an urbane pseudo-intellectual in a country that stretches between Europe and Asia, modernity and history. His personal history is rooted in the hard-scrabble soil of the national past, turned into self-dramatizing present, making him expansive and parsimonious, yearning and defensive, sceptical and sentimental all at once.

Gökhan Tiryaki’s cinematography is one of Ceylan’s great weapons in sustaining his films, with his capacity for finding a line of beauty in landscapes that offer no focal point, and capturing a sense of physical opposition, interior lights smeared in honeyed warmth and exteriors of sharp, yet bleary space. The drama of big egos and small towns could be played out just about anywhere, but Ceylan is keen to the specific nature of the environment he depicts, a place of history deep, dense, and boding, inflecting casual actions with an awareness that Ceylan articulates as a mood of haunting. Aydin often seems poised as if straining to hear something just beyond the frequency of human ears, the hum of the ghosts that inhabit these ancient hills. But Ceylan also notes the modernity infusing this landscape, the laptops and mobile phones, the presence of interloping tourists and the necessity of bilingualism (Aydin chats amiably with his Japanese tourists in English), things that define a borderless world, the sophisticated as opposed to the parochial. But it’s the parochial that’s inescapable once the tourists have fled the winter snows that will enclose everyone and force them to sit and stew in their thoughts. One wry scene shows Aydin and Hidayet skipping across the hotel’s muddy forecourt. When Hidayet asks why Aydin doesn’t pave it or cover it with gravel, Aydin retorts that if he did, his authenticity-craving clientele would be disappointed.

After the excoriating argument with Nihal, where Aydin’s bullying fails and forces him to try and save face in utter defeat, he announces he’s decided to decamp to Istanbul for a while to work on his book. But faced with a wait for a train and tramping around the cheerless, snow-clad expanse of the railway station, Aydin instead decides to go to Suavi’s house and hide out with him for a while. This amusing, pathetic discursion sees him getting drunk and gabbling with his friend and Levent, who’s also a pal of Suavi’s. Here the film becomes a gruesomely funny portrait of middle-aged men drinking in their underwear until they recite Shakespeare and then vomit on the floor. Understandably, Aydin is ultimately chastened by the experience. The trio then go out to stalk the hills and hunt, with Aydin cast as bandy-legged Hercules, managing to plug a rabbit after glancing around to see if there’s anyone else to do it for him. This funny antiheroic passage is contrasted by Nihal’s attempt to do a good deed and expiate Aydin’s excruciating patronisation of her moral intelligence. Just before he left, Aydin give her an envelope filled with cash to put towards the school fund, but Nihal knows all too well it’s essentially a bribe to make her think he’s a generous person after all.

Instead, Nihal resolves to give this money to Ismail’s family to help them out of trouble, and she treks to their house, where she chats with the stunned Hamdi, before Ismail enters, in a moment Ceylan shoots with sly operatic intensity, Ismail’s shadow falling on the floor just before he’s seen, looming like the tragic hero of some Wagnerian extravaganza. And indeed, he does suddenly possess such stature. Where most of Winter Sleep shows its kinship to the Chekhov of “Uncle Vanya” or “The Cherry Orchard,” here Ceylan, who had suggested the influence of Dostoyevsky in Anatolia, tips his hat more definitely to that Russian master. The subplot of Ismail and Ilyas proves to be a variation on that of Snegiryov and Ilyusha (note the similarity of the names of the boys) in “The Brothers Karamazov,” the tormented and fallen father triumphing before his son in his refusal to put money before pride, whilst also calling out to “The Idiot,” in a rejection of Nihal’s efforts that nonetheless proves cathartic in a distressing way for her. From Hidayet’s jeep Aydin glimpses the town of Garip and transforms it into a raft of humanity afloat on the elements, a promise of shifting perspectives and epiphanies that offers the climactic scenes a hint of awakening even in the midst of the winter snows that drown time and sound, and narcotise the will.