Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the most distinguished filmmakers alive and The Wild Pear Treeis arguably one of his best works to date, currently on show at the Denver Film Festival after its premiere at Cannes in the competition section earlier this year. If the viewer is patient to absorb a 3-hour film with lots of loaded conversations and meaningful visuals, the hours spent would be well compensated.More so, if the viewer is well read and perceptive. It is a film that encompasses social, political and theological thoughts without being too obvious. Remarks made in passing are not easy to ignore in any Ceylan film, less so in this one.
Sinan, the graduate, reads at home rather than look for work
On a very simplistic level, a young man Sinan returns home after graduating in a distant college to his home town after some years.He realizes his school-teacher father Idris has slid into a compulsive gambler, accumulating debts. His mother Asuman keeps the home running with a combination of tact, practicality and help from her neighbours. Asuman wants Sinan to earn a living now that he has graduated. Sinan slowly distances himself from his parents. Sinan, who has neither a definite career goal nor a life partner in mind, wishes to first publish his book that he describes as “quirky, auto-fiction, meta-novel, free of faith, ideology or agendas.”As an unknown author without any money to spare, he has to find financial support to get it printed. The title of the film The Wild Pear Tree is the title of the book Sinan wants to publish and he does get published eventually.As the film progresses the symbolic importance of trees is underlined at crucial places within the film visually by the Ceylan’s constant trusted cinematographer GokhanTiryaki. A wild pear tree growing in isolation, bears fruits, just as Sinan has earned a graduate degree. It is still a gnarled tree unlike popular pear trees, just as Sinan struggles for fuller acceptance within his family and community.
Sinan finally understands his father Idris, who he acknowledges never beat him
Sinan gives a copy of his book to his mother Asuman, acknowledging her role in his life
Sinan with his girlfriend minus her head scarf and her tresses blowing behind a tree
Those who have been exposed to Ceylan’s previous works will spot the common structures of Ceylan’s tales: the father, mother, and son trio in The Three Monkeys (2008); the several husbands and wives recalled by male characters in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)including an unforgettable comment in that film, “You don’t know how boys suffer here, without a father. It’s the kids who suffer most in the end, doctor, it’s the kids who pay for the sins of adults..”; and the see-sawingrelationship of a husband and wife in Winter Sleep(2014) overtly caring and respectful to each other, taking great care not to tread on each other’s toes. All the films are based on original scripts written by Ceylan and his wife Ebru Ceylan, sometimes working with a third co-scriptwriter; in the case of The Wild Pear Tree it is Akin Aksu,who additionally acts as one of the two debating Imams in the film. (When this critic had asked director Ceylan on his wife’s contribution to his films, soon after the release of Winter Sleep in a film festival “question and answer” session, Ceylan indicated that he was doubtful if his wife would work on his next film as she felt Winter Sleep was way too lengthy. Evidently, as in the case of all the wives in Ceylan’s films, luckily for us, she has continued to work with her husband in this equally long film: The Wild Pear Tree).
The Wild Pear Treeis structured around Sinan’s one-to-one interactions with several men (the town’s mayor, a wealthy sand merchant, a local author of repute, a former classmate, two Imams, and his father Idris) and two women (his mother and his girl friend). The town’s mayor, in his encounter with Sinan, emphasizes that his office is open and has no door and yet his actions seem to be contrary to his speech (an indirect comment on Turkish administrators). In the interaction with the sand merchant, the businessman acknowledges that he has indeed supported cultural causes, if it helps him in indirectly in his business. Conversations reveal a lot. Jobs for graduates are not easy to come by, “Education is great, but this is Turkey” . The film includes a conversation between Sinan and his former classmate who had no option but chose a career in the police, where he has to brutally beat up a friend who is rounded up as a protestor.
Scene of despondency in Ceylan's The Wild Pear Tree
Similar scene in Ceylan's earlier work The Three Monkeys
But Sinan does publish his book and present copies to his parents. But the film is not about this accomplishment—it is only a turning point to the bigger story of the film: Sinan’s gradual appreciation of his parents and their love towards him.
The high point of the film is Sinan’s accidental interaction with two Imams (Islamic priests).Sinan encounters the worthies stealing apples from a tree that does not belong to them and cheekily throws stones at them without revealing his presence to see their reaction.The tree here is not a pear tree, but the roles of trees in the film are not merely decorative. While you wonder about the possible connection to the tree in the Garden of Eden, the conversation between the Imams and Sinan (who has by now revealed himself) move on to free will in Islamic theology. In negation of the free will concept, most conservative Muslims constantly use the phrase ”Insah Allah” (if Allah wills) just as conservative Jews and Christians say “if it be Thy will” or Hindus refer to the role of“Karma” and “Atma.” The long conversation as the trio walks towards the town after picking of the apples can be heard clearly without interruption and the same sound level while the camera of Tiryaki captures the entire walk from varied distances and perspectives. Often the dense script of The Wild Pear Tree can be linked to works of the Turkish Sufi mystic Yusuf Emre and Russian literary masters Chekov and Dostoevsky. Director Ceylan is considerably influenced by Chekov, as per his own admission to this critic, during a public question and answer session.
Has Sinan's father committed suicide?
There are three occasions when trees make their presence felt in The Wild Pear Tree: once when the Imams pluck the apples that do not belong to them; once when Sinan sees his father had fallen under a tree with a cut rope dangling from it, a perfect suicide scenario; and once when Sinan kisses his girlfriend using the tree trunk for privacy. And all of them are important structural points in the film.
Ceylan, his wife Ebru and cinematographer Tiryaki are a constant talented team who add on other members as key crew members in each film. In The Wild Pear Tree, Ceylan usesa short segment of the 14 minute Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor repeatedly with very good effect--a work with religious implications that has been used by Coppola in The Godfatherin the baptism sequence and even by Jimi Hendrix in Lift Off.
Without a doubt, The Wild Pear Tree is one of the most important films of 2018, it also happens to be Turkey’s submission for the Oscars. The only caveat: it requires from the viewer considerable patience and attention to savor the tasteful details.
It is an important film for several reasons. Globally, very few feature films have dealt with agriculture as the focal point. In India, several important films were made on social themes related to agriculture—Mother India (1957), Do Bigha Zameen (Two acres of land) (1953) and Upkar (Good Deed) (1967) are examples. China’s Red Sorghum similarly dealt with society more rather than agriculture. Even the celebrated Russian film, Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) dealt with social issues of collective farming rather than agriculture per se. Semih Kapalonglu’s Grain is a rare feature film where the focus is more on agriculture and science, and less on the social fallouts. A rare film that could be compared to Grain in content is Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973)—a Hollywood film on a bizarre industrial response to alarming global food shortages.
Prof Erin (Barr) finally stumbles on an underground store of true, uncontaminated wheat seeds, collected by ants that could revive natural agriculture in uncontaminated soil. (The rough diagram indicates the typical ant-storage architecture, according to Kaplanoglu, which unfortunately is not explained to the viewer in the film)
Grain is notable because the film highlights the viewpoint of those who oppose the cultivation of genetically modified agricultural crops known as GMOs. GMO crops are those crops that have their DNA artificially altered by a process that does not happen naturally. The artificial process introduces genes from a different species or organism into the natural crop, boosting the ability of the altered crop/organism to survive diseases, insect pests, fungi and even extreme climates. More than half of the countries within the European Union have banned GMOs until long-term studies conclusively prove these to be safe for long-term human and animal consumption. The pro-GMO lobby asserts the modified crops are safe and necessary to feed the increasing populations. The controversy has led to many products sold in the market to be clearly marked as either “Organic” or “non-GMO” for the consumer who cares to consume safe farm produce. Most GMO crops are grown on soils treated by chemicals necessary for such GMO cultivation. Chemical contamination of soils where GMO crops have been cultivated is another growing source of concern highlighted in the film Grain.
Like the 2022 setting of the 1973 film Soylent Green, Kaplanoglu’s English film is a sci-fi film that is set in the near future. In the film Grain, GMO crop cultivation is the accepted norm for the majority of the population presented on screen and the private sector that develops and promotes GMO crop cultivation is a formidable and unrelenting force if one cares to challenge it. Soils have been contaminated by the associated chemicals required to grow GMO crops. Immigrants from less-endowed nations crowd “processing” centres hoping to be accepted by the richer countries even if they have to deal with its strict policing. People die of strange epidemics and when they die their bodies don’t rot or create a stench. This indeed is a dark subject fit to be made in black and white rather than in colour.
Opening sequences of multi-ethnic immigrants seeking better food and life in countries with strict policing and controls
Electro-magnetic "walls" keep undesirable immigrants away from the land of plenty
Kaplanoglu is a known admirer of the films of the acclaimed Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Kaplanoglu’s earlier film Milk , a constituent of his semi-autobiographical Yusuf trilogy, had a sequence where the protagonist’s mother is sitting on a fence just as Tarkovsky’s mother did in Tarkovsky’s famous autobiographical film Mirror (You could refer to the review of Milk on this blog showing that scene). There are several sequences in Grain that will remind a cineasteof Tarkovsky’s reflective sci-fi films Stalker and Solaris and even the theologically imbued final work Sacrifice, with a lone treein a barren landscape.
Grain’s original script, written by Kaplanoglu and his wife Leyla Ipecki, is not a typical sci-fi film. Beyond the sci-fi text is an overt layer of theology that is remarkably close to the films of Tarkovsky and perhaps even Kubrick’s 2001-A Space Odyssey. In an interview with this author, Kaplanoglu revealed that the inspiration for making this film came from a chapter/portion of the Holy Quran called Khef or the Kahf (cave)Sura. The entire film Grain questions the wisdom of human beings tinkering with nature, what the Creator of earth provided and the fallouts of such scientific meddling.
Stark beauty of Anatolia (Turkey) provide the location for the filmmakers where people in the film die suddenly from unknown epidemics
The film is not about disparaging conventional agricultural research involving hybrids and products of varietal cross breeding but those specifically about tinkering with natural species to create man-made species, and mindless destruction of natural resources in its wake for the sake of profit. The film Grain attempts to interconnect the life in a grain of wheat with life in humans, and how even lowly ants instinctively try to collect and preserve naturally occurring non-modified organic wheat grain for their own species’ survival. The argument the film present is notable absence of the fictional “n” particle missing in GMO crops but present in naturally bred crops.
The Prof (Barr) comprehends the importance of non-contaminated soil and natural organic farming devoid of chemicals
Grain is also important as the director Kaplanoglu and co-scriptwriter Ipecki try to contrast science with spirituality and theology. The end product can befuddle many and yet offer food for thought to those viewers who can pick up the details of spiritual metaphors, visual and verbal, that pour in cascades.
The story of Grain revolves around a seed geneticist Prof Erol Erin (Jean-Marc Barr, a French/American actor) who lives in a fictional city in the near future, the inhabitants of which are protected from multi-ethnic emigrants with electro-magnetic walls. “Erol” in Turkish means “brave.” For reasons unknown, the city’s nearby agricultural resources have been hit by a genetic crisis. In an internal meeting at the headquarters of the corporation that employs the geneticist, he learns of a fellow scientist who wrote a thesis on “Genetic chaos and the N particle” about the recurrent crises affecting genetically modified seeds is no longer employed by the corporation. In pursuit of this elusive scientist named Cemil Akmann (Ermin Bravo, a Bosnian actor), Prof Erin meets up with his daughter, who is silently communicating on the computer in a language unknown to the professor, living alone in a huge house in disrepair and apparent neglect. A word that appears on her computer screen is ELOHA (the Hebrew name for God). Prof Erin sets out to meet the fellow scientist in a perilous journey and does find him. The journey, though totally different from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, has several visual references to the Russian film masterpiece. There are exquisite shits of the Anatolian landscape in Turkey captured by cinematographer Giles Nuttgens adding hues of mystery and awe in equal measure, somewhat like the desolate word of the Dead Zone in Stalker. In Stalker, there is a stray dog that inspects the sleeping travellers; in Grain, a wolf inspects the tent of the sleeping Prof Erin. In both films, there is only a thin line that divides dreams and reality. In Grain, a child converses to the professor in the night in a dream sequence and then disappears under equally strange circumstances into the darkness. (Dreams play significant roles in two very important films of 2017: Grain and the Hungarian film On Body and Soul.) After meeting Akmann, Prof Erin prefers the life style of Akmann and chooses not to return to the city.
Two scientists, Cemil Akmann (Bravo) and Prof Erol Erin access the non-contaminated soil that can grow true organic crops and fall asleep after transporting it to useful locations for safe use
The film even includes a visual of burning bush that will strike a chord with viewers familiar with texts of the three Abrahamic religions. The Burning Bush on Mount Horeb (mentioned in the Book of Exodus in The Bible)is a bush that is never consumed by the fire and Moses is directed by God to remove his footwear as per the ancient religious texts, as he approaches the bush, while tending Jethro’s flocks. But is the Professor actually encountering the burning bush/tree or is it a dream? Those who have read the religious texts will associate the Burning Bush as a holy ground from where God speaks to Moses.
The film Grain begins with ultra modern electro-magnetic walls to keep out undesirable human beings and ends with a sequence where Akmann and Prof Erin spend time inspecting a stonewall, removing a stone here and there to peer through the gaps in the wall to glimpse Paradise. As in the end of 2001--A Space Odyssey, the final silent spectacle speaks for itself. Kubrick was an atheist; Kaplanoglu is not.
Sleeping among growing crops, like a child in a mother's womb--touches of Tarkovsky
The two scientists team up
This is a film that is important for viewers familiar with the GMO debate. The pro-GMO enthusiasts will debunk the science in this English film, which is a Turkish-German-Swedish-French-Qatari co-production. According to the director, the film has been wilfully kept out of certain important film festivals that wanted to initially screen the film by the influential pro-GMO lobby. In spite of this, the film won the top award at the Tokyo film festival. The film was shot in Michigan (USA), in Germany and in Turkey. Visually the film is stunning in its stark beauty—an antidote to colour and natural flora that one encounters in commercial cinema. The subject itself is an antidote to the prescription of a better world as seen by the private sector corporations for us.
Whether one agrees with the basic scientific premise of the film or not, Grainis definitely one of the most important films of 2017, arguably the most ambitious work of Kaplanoglu, especially for any reflective viewer with either an interest in science or in theology/spirituality.
P.S.The film Grain won the Best Film award at the recent Tokyo Film Festival and is included among the author's top 10 films of 2017. The Kaplanoglu films HoneyandMilkhave been reviewed earlier on this blog.The Tarkovsky filmsSolarisand Mirror, mentioned above,have also been reviewed earlier on this blog.The Hungarian filmOn Body and Soulhas also been reviewed on this blog.Turkey did not submit the film to compete for the Best Foreign Language film Oscar as the film was primarily in English.(Click on the coloured name of the film in this post-script to access that review)
Winter Sleep is one of the outstanding cinematic works of 2014.
Winter Sleep is a daunting 196 minutes long movie and could put off an uninitiated, immature viewer craving for action, sex and thrills. The Turkish director Ceylan, speaking to a packed audience that had earlier stood in long, winding queues on a humid December morning in Trivandrum city in India to view the award winning cinematic work and glimpse the accomplished director, during the International Film Festival of Kerala, India, stated with a note of apprehension “I hope all of you slept well last night as my film is more than 3 hours long.”
Interior lighting that embellishes the film
Winter Sleep, as in the case of the director’s previous two films—Three Monkeys and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia—proved one fact, it was a work of a contemporary master of cinema, while requiring a viewer’s undivided concentration to savour all the multifaceted morsels of delectable cinematic treats the film offers in the form of amazing performances, cinematography, choice of classic western music, and last but not least impressive script and direction. Winter Sleep deserved the two awards it won at the Cannes film festival—the Golden Palm for the best film of the festival and FIPRESCI prize for the content.
Winter Sleep is a film about several subjects of conflict and their resolution moulded into one tale, constructed with immaculate care.
The Script and the Scriptwriters
The husband-wife team of Ebru and Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been responsible for the last three masterpieces of director Ceylan. In all the three films, they have developed and presented varied types of husband and wife relationships. (Their collaboration is quite like another notable contemporary screenplay collaboration team made up of the Russian film director Andrei Zvyagintsev and scriptwriter Oleg Negin on their respective last three Russian masterpieces that culminated in Leviathan, a film that competed with Winter Sleep at Cannes and had to settle for the Best Screenplay Award, losing out on the top award to the Turkish contender).
The fascinating bit about Winter Sleep is that a real life husband-wife duo have come together to write about the fictional see-sawing relationship of a husband and a wife, who in this film are not cheating on one another and on many counts can be well considered as admirable individuals and perhaps from certain perspectives even as a devoted couple.
Husband Aydin (Bilginer) and wife Nihal (Sozen) in delicate hues of light and shade
The husband in Winter Sleep is a retired actor named Aydin of certain national repute. He has co-inherited, with his sister, a boutique hotel in a fascinating natural rocky setting of Cappadocia in Turkey attracting international tourists. Aydin’s wife is Nihal, an attractive young lady, who is evidently not as financially secure as her husband, whom she had admired in the past as an actor of repute and has been married to for a while. Nihal now finds Aydin to be “an unbearable man.” They have no offspring. Apart from helping run the small hotel, Nihal takes a proactive interest in the improvement of a local school and its affairs. Her husband has apparently never shown interest or an inclination to help improve the functioning of that school, which has caught the attention of his wife. He is busy writing a column for a small newspaper with limited readership, cocooned in his study filled with books and memorabilia of plays and films that he was associated with or liked and dreams of writing a book on the history of Turkish theatre. He has even named his hotel “Hotel Othello.” The script of the film shifts gears with the arrival of an electronic mail from a female reader of Aydin’s column. She respectfully requests Aydin’s help in improving the deplorable conditions of a school in a not-so-distant village by either providing direct monetary help or by Aydin, as a respected citizen, contacting influential government officials to provide more financial resources for the school. Aydin, who has never been interested in supporting Nihal’s pet school, suddenly wonders if he should respond positively to this distant admirer of his column. What follows in the film, provide sufficient details to show the cracks in the marriage of two otherwise admirable educated Muslims, Aydin and Nihal, both having diverse social acceptance by different sets of people. Unlike George and Martha of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where the husband and wife spewed venom at each other, in Winter Sleep, Aydin and Nihal are overtly caring and respectful to each other, taking great care not to tread on each other’s toes. Even the most hurtful comments made by Aydin’s sister Nacla towards her brother are gently-spoken, well-chosen words though sharp as knives. One unforgettable line from Nacla to her brother is “I wish my level of self deception was as low as yours.” So, too, are those of Nihal addressed to her recently divorced sister-in-law---subtle words and inflections of speech that drive home the intended critical message, without seeming to be ugly, even to the ears of the hotel‘s main employee who was in earshot. And like the Albee play (made into a memorable Hollywood film by Mike NIchols) there is reconciliation at the end, but in a quite unusual manner for the average Muslim male ego one often associates with the contemporary Middle East.
Mature performances are the mainstay of the film
This critic, who was able to throw a couple of questions at the director, during a post-screening public interaction, specifically asked Ceylan about his three film long collaboration with his wife Ebru in scriptwriting--all of which resulted in three consecutive major award-winning films at Cannes. The response was revealing and startling. Ceylan stressed the fact that Ebru an accomplished Turkish actress (she also acted in Ceylan’s early films Distant and Climates) and filmmaker had taken to scriptwriting very well. Ceylan explained that he himself was influenced by literature, specifically Russian literature and that Winter Sleep is very similar to Anton Chekhov’s short story The Wife. Ceylan, who was influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence when he was a young man, evidently continues to develop and construct scenes reminiscent of the Swedish maestro. While developing the script, Ebru kept reminding her husband Nuri Bilge that the script was way too long and the length needed to be reduced. Nuri Bilge Ceylan finally decided not to reduce the length as all the small details were important for him. As a jury member at Cannes, Ceylan recalled he wished Michael Haneke’s lengthy Austrian film White Ribbon could go on and on as it was great cinema just as he wishes certain badly made 80 minute long films would end quicker than their intended full duration. With remorse, he added to this critic, Ebru, his wife, might not work on a film script with him again after this decision to retain the film’s length and its myriad details. He added that he found women were stronger than men intellectually.
This critic decided to read the Chekhov story and compare it with Winter Sleep. In the Russian story there are similar characters and a parallel ending, when you compare it with the film. In the Russian story, the lead character wished to write a book on the history of railways, while in the movie the lead character Aydin wishes to write a book on the history of Turkish theatre, which both pursue in the separate creative works. But more importantly, both works look closely at the social divide, in Russia (in the short story) and in Turkey (in the film). The social divide leverages the emergence of the fissure in the husband-wife relationship in both the movie and short story and therefore serves as an important sub-plot in both tales.
Social Commentary of Chekhov and of the Ceylans
In Winter Sleep, asin theRussian short story, the social divide is all pervasive. The landed gentry live in comfort concerned only whether their tenants pay their rents on time and do not hesitate to take corrective action if they are not paid, blind to the financial conditions of their tenants. The Ceylans, in their script, weave in the reactions of children and old women in the family of the tenants (an aspect Chekhov never dealt with) deprived of their TV by the owners because the rents have not been paid. For Chekhov, the peasants were hit by famine; for the Ceylans, it is a population who sought refuge after calamities decades ago. The Ceylans’ script even details the reaction of the landed gentry to the smelly socks of a tenant, oblivious of the fact that the poor tenant has walked miles to make a token payment. Even the employees of hotel treat the less financially supported tenant with disdain by bringing small female slippers for a male adult tenant, who has left his muddy shoes outside, when Aydin asks the employee to bring slippers to protect the visitor’s feet from the cold floor. The boiling anger of the socially deprived folks towards the well-heeled landowners reminds one of Dostoevsky’s literary works, just as a swooning young boy in Winter Sleep reminds one of passages describing an epileptic in The Idiot. In Winter Sleep, the husband Aydin passing value judgements on the lack of cleanliness of the poor is contrasted with his wife Nihal who is a naive do-gooder who senses the pain of poorer sections of society. Both have differing attitudes and perspectives of the poor. Nihal does painfully realize that “hell is paved with good intentions.”
Aydin writes his column while sister Necla (background) provides bitter criticism
Shakespeare in Winter Sleep
There is no Shakespeare in Chekhov’s story but Ceylan’s love for Shakespeare goes beyond the name of the hotel in Winter Sleep. There are two references to Richard III in the movie. The title itself connects with the famous line of the play “Now is the winter of discontent...” and towards the end one of the minor characters verbally attack Aydin with the quotation from the same play “Conscience is but a word that cowards use devised at first to keep the strong in awe; our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.”
Winter Sleep may not be an obvious treatise on conscience of the rich and powerful but on some reflection the film is indeed on this subject. It is not without reason that the Ceylans have called the film by that name and introduced Richard III’s lines into the script.
The ambiguous, reflective visage of Nihal (Melisa Sozen), the wife, at the end of the film
Religion in Winter Sleep
Turkey is a Muslim country and it is inconceivable to make a realistic feature film without touching on religion. In answer to another pointed question from this critic on the references to religion in the film, Ceylan noted that intellectuals worldwide are not worried about religion. In the film Winter Sleep, the rent defaulting tenant is an Imam, a religious figure, who curses the inconsiderate rich landlord under his breath, while literally going the extra mile to grovel and appease his landlord. The Ceylans’ script makes Aydin realize that his roles on stage as an imam were all wrong after his brief interactions with his tenant imam. The former actor Aydin is taunted by his acerbic sister Necla as she describes him as a Muslim who never goes to a mosque to pray and yet writes about the importance of cleanliness by the devout. Another taunt by Necla that deeply hurts Aydin is “Philanthropy isn't tossing a bone to a hungry dog. It’s sharing when you are equally hungry.” And by stark contrast, the Chekhov short story has no mention of religion.
Ceylan, the Director, and Animals as Allegories
The cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan has increasingly used animals—the role of dogs in Once Upon a Time in Anotolia is easily recalled. In Winter Sleep, horses, a dead dog and a hare get attention. And interestingly, this is purely the Ceylans’ contribution, not Chekhov’s. Aydin, the retired-actor-cum-hotel-owner, never owned a horse. Since a hotel guest points out to him that the hotel’s website shows horses, Aydin is persuaded to purchase a wild horse, which is subdued and kept in the hotel’s makeshift stable. It does not require the brains of a rocket scientist to see the parallels between the horse and Nihal as what happens to the horse is related to the husband-wife relationship. So do the allegories of the dead dog’s carcass and the waiting carrion birds on the tree branches connect up with the film’s plot. And the final quixotic proof of ability to hunt game by killing a hare and showing the trophy to his wife Nihal provides considerable visual treats for the viewer to mull over the ambiguous ending.
Profile of Aydin in reverse before he spots the dead dog
Ceylan’s Actors
Winter Sleep is a tale of a retired actor Aydin and his wife. It was imperative that Aydin’s character be played by an able performer. Ceylan achieves this by casting Haluk Bilginer, a Turkish actor with considerable experience on the British stage and TV, who is a delight to watch as he interprets Aydin on screen. So are Melisa Sozen as Nihal and Nejat Isler (who was equally impressive in Semih Kaplanoglu’s Egg) as Ismail, the elder brother of the Imam. While these three performers are top-notch, the other minor characters such as the Imam Hamdi, his nephew Ilyas, and Aydin’s sister Necla will not fail to impress a perceptive viewer. Winter Sleep is not a film held together by one actor, it is held together by an ensemble of quality actors well chosen by the director.
Cinematography in Winter Sleep
No discussion on this remarkable film would be complete without praising the cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki, who has been a regular collaborator of Ceylan and has been responsible for capturing effective external and indoor scenes with dramatic effect, more so in the latter. His use of light and shadows in interior shots will remain in a viewer’s memory, film after film. In Winter Sleep, his reverse angle shots of Aydin and slow zoom in on Aydin’s head at key junctures in the film are remarkable. The rock thrown at Aydin’s Landrover can be seen in flight before the ultimate impact and one doubts if special effects were employed.
Reverse shot of Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) in light and shadows
Lastly, the final shots of both Winter Sleep and Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (cinematographer Mikhail Krichman) are almost identical wordless shots of rocky snowy landscapes. Both films are outstanding and comparable. Winter Sleep won the top award at Cannes but failed to reach even the final nomination stage at the Oscars. Leviathan won the Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination, and the Cameraimage Golden Frog award, the most prestigious award for cinematographers.
Music in Winter Sleep
The choice of music in a film by the director is often missed out by viewers. In Winter Sleep,music is sparsely used, but when it is utilized it embellishes the cinematic work. The piece of music Ceylan uses is Schubert’s Sonata no. 20 in A major the very same piece of music used by Robert Bresson in his French classic Au Hazard Balthazar. By a coincidence, the French classic is one of Ceylan’s favourite films.
Concluding Remarks
Though this critic is a great votary of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and considers him to be one of the finest directors alive and making films, the best work of Ceylan remains Three Monkeys, the first movie the director collaborated with his wife on the script. Both Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Semih Kaplanoglu, two remarkable Turkish directors, have injected a new life into Turkish cinema to take it new highs in world cinema.
P.S.Winter Sleepis one of the top 10 films of the author in 2014.Three Monkeys (2008) andOnce Upon a Time in Anatolia(2011) have being reviewed on this blog earlier. Three Monkeys is the lone Ceylan work on his top 100 films list. A report of a brief interaction between the author and Nuri Bilge Ceylan in December 2014 at Trivandrum’s International Film Festival of Kerala published on the Dear Cinema website can be accessed at http://dearcinema.com/article/men-intellectually-not-strong-women-nuri-bilge-ceylan/1346 Zvyagintsev'sLeviathan(2014) and Nichol'sWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), mentioned in the above analysis, have been also earlier reviewed in detail on this blog. Mr Ceylan is also one of the author's 15 favourite active filmmakers
Semih Kaplanoglu is one of the finest Turkish filmmakers—and one who has a very distinct and intriguing style of film-making. His cinema is slow, introspective and personal. He picks his actors for each role and camerapersons with considerable thought and care and the result is always apparent in the finished products. In his films, the emphasis is not on the spoken word but more on what you see and hear. In his Yusuf trilogy, each film is remarkable in the unusual manner it expounds the subtle weaves of a dyad—a sociologically significant relationship---some obvious and some less so. Süt (Milk) belongs to that very same Yusuf trilogy and constitutes the middle film in the trilogy. The three Yusuf films constantly remind this writer of the James Joyce novel A Portrait ofthe Artist as A Young Man. The Yusuf films offer epiphanies and the coming of age autobiographical tale of a sensitive artist just as James Joyce had developed his own semi-autobiographical “Yusuf” that he called Stephen Dedalus, complete with physical disabilities. Joyce is demanding of the reader: so is Kaplanoglu’s cinema of the viewer. But the patient and intelligent viewer of the Kaplanoglu films will be rewarded just as Joyce is rewarding to an analytic and reflective reader.
Few films have an opening sequence as unforgettable as the one in Semih Kaplanoglu’s film Süt (Milk). The scene is rural Turkey. The viewer is initially shown some villagers watching some activity from a distance on a misty morning. People are talking in hushed tones. An old man is boiling a pot of milk in the open and writing something. The camera then reveals the unusual bit above the boiling pot of milk—a young girl is strung live upside down from a tree branch so that the fumes of the boiling milk reach her face. The viewer wonders if some weird devilish torture sequence is to follow. If the viewer is already squirming in the seat, wait---out of the mouth of the girl emerges a small live snake. End of sequence. A patient viewer will sit through the film and realize that this bizarre opening sequence has one primary linkage with the main film---not the girl, not the old man, not the snake but just milk. And Milk is the title of this film and milk has so many tenuous connections to the sequences that follow, just as the other titles of the Yusuf films connect with sequences in those.
Months after viewing this unusual scene in the film, this critic decided to ask the director directly about this unusual sequence that reminds one of some kind of exorcism. Kaplanoglu’s response is revealing “There is nothing unreal about it. At first we tried model snakes in that scene, but they didn’t seem realistic no matter how hard we tried to make them seem so. I decided not to make that scene. We had little snakes in jars which were brought by a zoologist, and we used it in the other scenes. Ms. Ozen (the actress hung upside down in the film) said that she would put one of them into her mouth. We were surprised but started to think about it. The snakes have an interesting property. When they are hot, they move very fast; when they are cold they move very slowly. Our zoologist suggested we decrease the body temperature of the snake so that Ms. Ozen could put it into her mouth without any risk. I looked at both the zoologist and Ms. Ozen with surprise. It was a dreadful thing, but both the zoologist and Ms. Ozen persuaded me to allow them to do it. So we made the scene. When the film was shown abroad, some people asked me if that was just an old wives’ tale. It is not. It usually happens to people in that region. When workers sleep near the water, some snakes slither into their mouths and then into their stomachs. And people drink lots of milk so that the snake can go throughout their intestines with the milk and come out of their bodies at the other end. Or they hang upside down from a branch so that the snake falls out through their mouths. “
Süt (Milk) is the second film of Semih Kaplanoglu’s Yusuf trilogy—and it deals with the adolescent Yusuf and his mother living in a village in Turkey. While it is a standalone feature film, Süt (Milk) can be best appreciated if the viewer has seen the other two Kaplanoglu films in the Yusuf trilogy. This is because of the absence of the father in Süt (Milk) and the relationship of Yusuf with his father is never revealed in this film—the viewer gets to know about that relationship in the next film in the trilogy Bal (Honey). The second film in the Yusuf trilogy is not a mere Oedipal tale as it could suggest in isolated deconstruction but more about the original mother-son relationship (possibly with breast milk being a forgotten link that is never shown or alluded to in the film) as the young man has grown up and is selling milk, one of the many rural outputs produced on their farm (run by Yusuf and his mother), in the nearby town. Yusuf’s complex psyche is comprehensively and progressively unraveled only after watching the three Kaplanoglu films in the trilogy. Once the viewer has seen all the three films, the Oedipal angle in Süt (Milk) recedes in significance and the viewer grasps the trilogy is really about the artist flowering from bud to bloom. Explains Kapalonglu on his website “We all have mothers and it is highly possible that much is hidden in the time we spent with our mothers, and the time we are no longer able to spend with them.”
Süt (Milk) is indeed a complex film. It captures the tension of a young man who wishes to be a poet, and yet is an introvert, a loner, a reader of books and one who has toiling on a farm with his mother to make ends meet, especially in the absence of a father, the traditional bread winner of all conventional families. When the struggling young poet does get his first poem published in a local journal of repute, both mother and son are happy—but for different reasons. The poem is about a beautiful, adorable woman. The mother, as most mothers would, believes it is about some young girl her son fancies, while in reality the poem is about her. The film is indeed about how the mother figure plays a crucial part in a poet’s life just as the father was so crucial to the development of the poet at an earlier stage in life (as depicted in Bal (Honey).
And there are women in Süt (Milk) who knock at Yusuf’s door, figuratively speaking. A local girl is attracted to him but the constant cell phone conversations by the girl to others while in Yusuf’s company, underscore for Yusuf how meaningless the relationship is or would end up being. At the same time, there is a sequence where Yusuf looks at a female silhouette in a Turkish bathhouse. The director seems to imply that the young poet is interested in the opposite sex but they do seem literally and figuratively shadowy and out of focus at this stage of his life. Kaplanoglu’s cinema is just that—beads of intriguing shots and sequences that could make an interesting necklace only if the viewer chooses to string them together.
Kaplanoglu’s Süt (Milk) provides insights into the manly aspirations of the Turkish male—it is a rite of passage in life to be enrolled in the military—apparently a done thing in that country to be considered a regular male Turk. And Yusuf flunks the entrance requirements as he is found to be epileptic (for Joyce’s Dedalus it was poor eyesight that was a stone round the young artist’s neck). Later in the film Milk, Yusuf the reject from the military is working in a mine of sorts with a friend whose pocket is filled with unpublished poems. Yusuf is physically capable of hard manual labor but he is still attracted towards poetry or friends equally interested in poetry. Milk is a film with sequences that can imply that imply much more than is shown. For instance young Yusuf catches a fish that could make a great meal for him and his mother. When he reaches the kitchen, to his surprise he finds his mother plucking a bird’s feathers. Obviously someone else has provided it. The sequence underscores that Yusuf is not and will not be the breadwinner for the family; his mother has chosen someone else for that role. That is Kaplanoglu’s cinema—quiet statements that add up to paint a larger picture.
Kaplanoglu’s third and arguably the most fascinating film in the trilogy is called Bal (Honey) and that film explores the father-son relationship with Yusuf as a young boy, where the presence of the mother is not paramount. His first film Yumurta (Egg) in the Yusuf trilogy looks at Yusuf as a grown up man, with both his parents now dead, but assessing a relationship with a woman who could possibly be the key to his aspirations to sculpt an artist’s life. Thus while Honey explored Yusuf under the influence of his father, Milk explores Yusuf’s growth in the shadow of his mother, while Egg deals with Yusuf who has emerged from the parental shadows and is able to understand complexities of life on his own, having distilled the influences of both his parents. Kaplanoglu is one of the two mesmerizing Turkish filmmakers alive and making films today--the other being Nuri Bilge Ceylan. While Nuri Bilge Ceylan has written and developed most of his recent works with his spouse Ebru Celyan and an early work with Emin Ceylan, Semih Kaplanoglu has often developing his scripts either on his own or with Orçun Köksal (on Honey and Egg) and Özden Cankaya (on his debut film Away from Home). If there is a major difference between Kaplanoglu and Ceylan, it would be that Kaplanoglu’s films are more personal and inward looking than Ceylan’s cinema. Both filmmakers are distinctive in their respective styles and both are fascinating filmmakers.
This writer was intrigued by the physical oddities of the character Yusuf in Kapalnoglu’s Honey and Milk, especially when we know that the trilogy is close to the life and thoughts of the director and screenplay writer. In Honey, the young Yusuf is very close to the director Kapalanoglu. Kaplangolu had clarified in an earlier interview put up on the European film awards website that Yusuf “has parts from me. I referred to my own youth and childhood while writing the three scripts and I believe I was able to handle the issues about Yusuf’s life, troubles and quests realistically. My own childhood served as a point of reference for the script of Bal (Honey) as well. My troubles at school while trying to learn how to read and write, my questions which grown-ups left unanswered, the intense cruelty and richness of nature...”
In Milk, the young Yusuf is not conscripted into the armed forces because of his epilepsy. Kaplanoglu’s explanation provided to this writer’s query on the epileptic Yusuf is revealing—and it reveals the influences on a sensitive director while developing a script. Explains Kapalanoglu, “Yusuf’s illness is genetic and was passed on to him from his father. This illness is all that remains of the father in Egg. It is also related to the sensitivity of Yusuf. I don’t see any men with epilepsy nowadays, but when I was a child there were lots. It was not uncommon to see people having seizures in the street. They were so common that the proper ways to help someone in that condition became common knowledge. Also Prince Myshkin has epilepsy in Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”. It was a character that influenced me years ago. Maybe this is why I decided for Yusuf to have epilepsy in the film.” For those familiar with Prince Myshkin, the actions of Yusuf in Milk and Egg do bear some resemblance.
The most useful response of Kapalnoglu to this critic’s specific questions was the one relating religion--an element that was quite obvious in Honey, but less prominent in Milk and Egg. Explained Kapalanoglu : “According to many religions, this is the journey of the soul which comes from the spiritual world, matures in this physical world and returns to the spiritual world when we die. According to those religions, this world is merely an illusion, a test, a play ground, a dream as Prophet Mohammed said ‘All the human beings are asleep, when they die, they wake up.’ This is a circle which unites Yusuf’s life with the adventures of mankind. Yusuf’s life story is the life story of mankind.” This is probably why the cinematic works of Kaplanoglu (Turkey), Clair Denis (France), Zvyagintsev (Russia), Reygadas (Mexico), Kawase (Japan) and, last but not the least, Terrence Malick (USA) stand out as substantive personal cinema of a philosophical kind rarely encountered today.
P.S. Kaplanoglu's Bal (Honey) was reviewed earlier on this blog. Viewers who have seen Tarkovsky's Mirror will note several points of convergence in the scene where the baby Alexei's mother meets the doctor who has lost his way and falls down while sitting on the fence and the scene in Kaplanoglu's Milk, where the postman falls down from his bicycle while making small talk with Yusuf's mother. In both films, the rear part of the respective mother's head is underscored in close-up while opening the scene. (See the clip below.)
Turkish cinema made an impact on the world map in the early Eighties essentially because the honest nationalist realism of the Kurd actor/screenplay-writer/director Yilmaz Güney was blooming and gaining world attention. Güney, like many outstanding Iranian filmmakers today, was imprisoned in Turkey again and again, as he was perceived to be an inconvenient threat to the government until he died in 1984 in exile. With his passing, there seemed to be no one who could fill Güney’s boots for two decades. Eventually, two Turkish directors Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Semih Kaplanoglu have emerged and raised Turkey’s profile once again in contemporary world cinema as no other, with achievements that shadow each other. Both have already made film trilogies: Ceylan, a trilogy referred to as ‘the provincial trilogy’, and Kaplanoglu the ‘Yusuf’ trilogy. Ceylan (born in 1959) is some 4 years older to Kaplanoglu (born in 1963). Both have made about five to six feature films. Both began as photographers/cameramen, graduating to becoming the toast of major film festivals such as Cannes and Berlin as film directors. Both cast their own family members as actors and crew in their films. Both have not just proved their abilities as filmmakers but have in their films indirectly promoted the natural splendours of the Turkish landscape to the world audiences to devour.
This is a perspective that a viewer of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest work Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ought not to ignore. Ostensibly a long feature film on the investigation of a murder, the cinematic work offers much more to an attentive and patient viewer. Ceylan’s interest in photography is probably most evident when he collaborates with his cinematographer, Gökhan Tiryaki, in his past three feature films. The visually rich Turkish film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia demands a lot from its viewer as the visuals compete for attention of the viewer as much as the narrative. Viewers, unfamiliar with Turkey, would wonder where Anatolia is on the modern global map. When the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone made films with similar titles, his “West” and his “America” were not difficult to pinpoint. When the Mexican filmmaker Robert Rodriguez reprised the phrase in his 2003 film with “Mexico,” once again the geography was easy to pinpoint and unambiguous. Not so with Anatolia.
Anatolia is an ancient name for much of modern Turkey. It is the name associated with much of Turkey from the days of Alexander the Great. What is important for the viewer to note and reflect on is that Ceylan chose the term Anatolia rather than Turkey, when the tale he presents is of modern day Turkey, of individuals and mindsets that are not historical but contemporary. Perhaps for Ceylan and co-sciptwriters (comprising his wife Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kasal, the very same team that wrote the brilliant Three Monkeys) the mindset and values have not changed with time and perhaps for them modern Turkey is no different from Anatolia of the ages past.
The viewer is presented a murder story that begins in the night. By the end of the film, the truth behind the murder is unravelled, with visuals bathed in sunlight. The journey from darkness to light reveals a lot more than the solving of a murder. The tale is one that goes beyond the story of any one individual but of many individuals, powerful individuals, less powerful mortals on the fringes of society, individuals living in towns and individuals living in the villages, individuals educated and not so educated. Some individuals murder human beings, others murder truth. The title of the film suggests that the viewer is being told an old fable, but the viewer will soon realize the film is a contemporary tale, a melancholy one that suggests more than what is obvious on a casual viewing.
A prosecutor dictates a report that will have legal muscle, which is essentially his own parochial view, without any real questioning or discussions. A doctor conducts an autopsy without touching the corpse. A village elder passionately demands a morgue in a village which has poor electrical connections rather than ask for any other modern amenity one associates with progress. Ceylan’s film is crowded with male characters, with only two female characters appearing briefly on screen, and one (the prosecutor’s dead wife) who never appears physically but is discussed at length. In the middle of the cinematic investigation of the murder of a man someone suggests “Look for the woman.” The film develops into an autopsy of male minds rather than of a male corpse. The irony that the script gradually develops gets further underscored by the scientifically rigid doctor, who is a votary of autopsies to investigate abnormal deaths, deciding to doctor the autopsy at hand, after looking out of the window at a woman.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the viewer will realize, is less about the investigation of a murder than an investigation of a social psyche of a people who have not changed over the ages. Ceylan makes you wonder if truth was ever documented in the region but buried alive because it was convenient.
Though the bulk of the film is talk-heavy, the film’s strength lies in the visuals. The prologue of the film, before title credits, reveal three men talking in a large room in the night, followed by a shot of that building from the outside, patrolled by a stray dog, and finally that vision is finally cut off by a passing truck. Dogs reappear at critical moments again in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia—once again when the body is found and later at the gates of the village elder. Having visited Turkey on two occasions, this critic finds the role of the dogs in the film surprising, as stray dogs are rare to spot in that country compared to well-fed stray cats. Evidently, Ceylan employs dogs to tell the viewer something; perhaps it is a mere a cinematic punctuation in the tale, perhaps more. This critic does not recall dogs appearing in either Climates (2006) or Three Monkeys (2008), the two preceding Ceylan films.
Visuals continue to be important in this film. At the end of the superb Three Monkeys, dark clouds, a lovely metaphor, loomed over the Marmara Sea. In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, thunder and lightning are heard and seen but no rain falls on the beautiful weather beaten landscape. In fact, the lightning lights up a carving on the rocky hillside scaring the wits out of a man with much to hide in his life. When the electricity in the village fails, Ceylan and Tiryaki, introduce the village elder’s beautiful daughter’s face illuminated in the dark by lamps and candles for a short sequence as she silently serves tea to the guests. The effect of her appearance and presence is felt by the men on the screen, harking back to the women in their lives. It is a great moment of epiphany. Soon after that the prisoner in the group exclaims aloud as he sees a man who he thought was dead.
And again, much later, it is the final image of the dead man’s wife walking on a lonely path, as seen from the autopsy room, which brings the cinematic tale to a closure.
Ceylan’s film is about women seen through the eyes of men. Somewhere in the film the prosecutor tells the doctor: “Women can sometimes be very ruthless.” Much later in the film, after long exchanges of views with the doctor, the prosecutor concludes himself, that the death of his “gorgeous” wife was not as he had made it out to be all these years. Men cheat on their wives, they kill for the sake of women they love, and yet consider these women to be ruthless even in their stoic silence captured by the film. These are vignettes of Anatolia over the ages, repeated to this day. Ceylan seems to ask the viewer to reassess history in this context.
Ceylan’s use of the camera to track the fall of an apple from a tree, rolling down the slopes and a stream to settle where other such fallen apples are gathered speaks a lot for his metaphoric ability to connect nature and man. Even when a child throws a tomato at his father (not knowing the kinship) the camera focuses on the emotions of the mother and father, and those images unveil a story never directly discussed in the movie.
The remarkable aspect of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema is that he presents the obvious contradictions in society; he refrains from taking a high moral ground. He leaves it to the viewer to decide every issue each viewer has perceived in his films.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011, the second highest award at the event after the Golden Palm. (Ceylan might have won the Golden Palm if Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Lifewas not competing with his film.) It has also won the best film award at the Haifa Film Festival, the grand prize of the critics at Sao Paolo Film festival, the Grand Jury Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen awards, and the special jury award at the Dubai film festival. Ceylan’s film can appear to be lengthy and tedious, but the film offers delightful stories within the main story, some said, some unspoken. It is for the alert viewer to pick up the strands such as this comment from the prosecutor: “You don’t know how boys suffer here, without a father. It’s the kids who suffer most in the end, doctor, it’s the kids who pay for the sins of adults.” The film is in a way the collective, melancholic story of Anatolia over the ages repeating over the many generations. To call the film “Once Upon a Time in Turkey” would have missed the director’s implicit intent.
