Everyday Existentialism: The Next Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Uzak

Everyday Existentialism

Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films are both a little grounded and a little weightless. In Clouds of May (Mayis Sikintisi [1999]) and Distant (Uzak [2002]), rural factory workers and urban filmmakers alike struggle to act practically and sensibly, but find themselves returning time and again to the questions left unanswered in their heads. These sad men and women ruminate on jobs and everyday life while gazing across snowy parks, waving fields of wheat or ancient trees. They think about working aboard ocean liners while gazing at shipwrecks stuck in icy harbor waters. They cautiously tread the line between external and interior lives, the duality of their existence visible in their weather-beaten, life-beaten faces. It is as though we are watching not film, but the director’s very thoughts and experiences as they play out across the screen of his mind.

Every year, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s (BAM) BAMCinématek selects an up-and-coming director to showcase in its “Next Director” series, coinciding with the “Next Wave” theatre and music festival. For the 2004 season, Ceylan is the honoree, offering New York City the chance to see his fascinating work. Although the director of only three features and one short, Ceylan has swiftly established a name for himself in both his native Turkey and abroad. The Small Town (Kasaba [1998]), Ceylan’s first feature-length film, is shot in black and white and, like later efforts, uses his own family as protagonists. Clouds of May, in which Ceylan again casts his mother and father, won him a European Critics Award at the European Film Awards. Ceylan’s most recent film, Distant, won the Grand Prix and Best Actor awards at Cannes, and displays an incredibly confident aesthetic rare in such a relatively young filmmaker (Ceylan is 44).

While Distant achieved some acclaim stateside, most of Ceylan’s film’s have been unavailable in the U.S. or have screened only very briefly. Even many film buffs are unaware of contemporary Turkish cinema, but his work shows that film is alive and well — if somber — in Turkey. Indeed, his deft movies also prove that auteurism yet survives. Generally written, shot, directed, and edited by Ceylan on miniscule budgets with amateur actors, the films are realistic without being pandering, raw and intense.

Yet they are also quiet for very long stretches, peppered with long shots and weighted glances, with important plot points or moments discernible on an almost subconscious level. A gesture, a word, a swatch of color might bear immense meaning in Ceylan’s world, creating a kind of formalism focused on scrutiny and precision. Truly, Ceylan is operating on a subtler level than most contemporary filmmakers. He seems to set the camera down, and leave it to “watch,” a technique evocative of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (this even as Ceylan professes his love for Andrei Tarkovsky, whose influence is also evident in Ceylan’s sober pacing and often sparse dialogue). In Clouds of May, where the filmmaker Muzaffer (Muzaffer Özdemir) journeys back to his small village and casts his factory worker cousin (Emin Toprak, Ceylan’s cousin) and parents (Emin Ceylan and Fatma Ceylan, Ceylan’s parents) in a film-within-a-film. Here Ceylan’s depiction of small town life — with everyone living for small pleasures, and maturity, for better or for worse, most evident in children — resonates more strongly with Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).

In Ceylan’s deliberate focus on subplots, Clouds of May considers watching and listening, learning about the world through seemingly unimportant moments. Young Ali (Muhammad Zimbaoglu), Muzaffer’s nine-year-old cousin, is given a raw egg by his grandmother (Fatma Ceylan). In order to obtain the musical watch he wants so desperately, Ali must hold the egg in his pocket, unbroken, for 40 days. Ali’s attempts to keep the egg whole are affecting precisely because they operate on several levels; on the one hand, his difficulty is amusing and sweet, while on the other, it is a metaphor for existential crisis and the constant disappointments endured through a lifetime of struggle. When the egg breaks, not through Ali’s carelessness but while he is fulfilling a familial obligation, it is devastating.

The message is clear: no matter how good people are or how much good they attempt to do, there will be circumstances beyond their control and pain to endure. Ali’s reaction, to cheat and get a new egg when he resisted cheating for over 30 days, becomes not immature folly, but acquiescence to life’s unfairness. Ceylan here wraps a story of every person into a single moment in a boy’s life.

In Distant, Ceylan provides similar intimations of universality in the modest experiences of two Turks: a small-town worker and an urban sophisticate. Again casting the excellent actors Muzaffer Özdemir and Emin Toprak as Mahmut and Yusuf, Ceylan tells the quiet story of Yusuf’s failed attempts to find work and companionship in Istanbul, and Mahmut’s failed attempts to connect with anyone, even himself. As Yusuf drifts through Istanbul, his inherent tenderness comes through in misread ways; he looks at a young girl next to him on the bus and is treated with disgust, he tries to follow other women and they see him as a predator.

What makes Distant so brilliant is its display of both sides: Yusuf as misunderstood man-child, Yusuf as danger to single attractive women in the city. At the same time, the relationship between Yusuf and Mahmut is never easy to comprehend. Yusuf takes advantage of Mahmut’s generosity by overstaying his welcome in Mahmut’s flat and by leaving a mess everywhere he goes. Yet Mahmut’s stoicism and pettiness create other holes in his life; if he could only reach beyond himself, he might hold onto women for more than a few nights and regain a confidence he has all but lost.

This kind of interplay is revealed in the tiniest of moments (Yusuf braying at the television over an irritated Mahmut’s shoulder, Mahmut trying desperately to tell his ex-wife that he still loves her). Towards the end, when Yusuf has returned to the village, Mahmut sits on the piers of Istanbul, gazing across the frozen waters at the ships where Yusuf hoped to work. Divorced from companionship, city, and self, he is unable to function, and his desperation turns again into resignation.

Ceylan has said that with Distant he wished to make a film about the futility of life — a grand gesture, to be sure, and one that might typically sound impossible. Yet from Ceylan, such a goal is attainable. In his graceful camerawork and lilting, sad, complex relationships, Ceylan brings big questions to an almost devastatingly effective gut level. The “next director,” indeed. In his melancholic pessimism and everyday existentialism, Ceylan brings hope, at least, to cinema.