By Jim Gilles
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 6/2/22 – On-screen at several Laemmle theatres and coming soon to the Lumiere Cinema in Beverly Hills is a newly-restored print of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s third feature film Distant (Uzak, Turkey, 2002). Distant is a minimalist, elliptical narrative that provides a subtle character study of a middle-aged man coming to grips with his life disappointments. Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) is a relatively successful commercial photographer in the midst of an existential crisis. He has been struggling to come to terms with the growing gap between his artistic ideals and his professional obligations. His tedious workload, coupled with the lingering loss he still feels for his ex-wife (newly married and on the verge of leaving Istanbul for Canada), leaves Mahmut clinging to the melancholic and obsessive routines of his solitary life. Without warning, Mahmut’s distant relative Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) arrives in Istanbul determined to find a job aboard a ship so that he may fulfill his dream of traveling around the world. In need of a place to stay as he searches for work, Yusuf imposes himself on Mahmut, who resents the sudden intrusion, but nonetheless feels obliged to help his family. Distant is a moving character piece from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which clearly derives some of its sensibilities from Andrei Tarkovsky and Yasujiro Ozu, with a dose of Chekhov in the mix.
The film is 20 years old and harkens back to the period in late November 2000 and early February 2001when Turkey experienced a severe economic crisis, when many factories shut down and the consumer price inflation soared to 55% and the Turkish lira lost 51% of the value against major foreign currencies. This explains why Mahmut’s distant relative Yusuf has left his rural village and come to Istanbul in search of work. Yusuf has left home because the recession caused a shutdown of the local factory and he now plans on escaping the village for good by finding any job on a ship, but needs a place to stay until he finds work. Yusuf foolishly thinks he can get hired on one of the ships in the port, but there are no jobs, and an old sailor informs him that the wages are so bad, he’ll never have anything left over to send home. On the other hand, Turkey in 2001 was a more secular country than it seems today, and certainly, from my perspective, as a frequent visitor to Turkey. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, did not come to power until 2014 and that is when the more conservative civil and religious mandates began to be put in place.
Mahmut originally came to Istanbul without a cent from a small village and without help achieved relative success as a commercial photographer. He’s reeling from his recent divorce to Nazan, whom he still loves and misses greatly but who is leaving shortly with her new husband to live in Canada. Mahmut once had artistic ideals and dreamed of being another Tarkovsky, but has settled for economic security and being practical – which means sitting in his comfortable apartment (actually the director’s own pad) and spending his leisure hours watching vacuous TV programs on a big-screen TV. Briefly he plays a DVD of Tarkovksy’s Stalker on his large television (typical of those in the early 2000s) but soon loads a porn video as a distraction. He leads a solitary, obsessive and carefully orchestrated life, one in which he can’t escape from his lingering unhappiness and inability to communicate with others. His long haunting looks out at space or at individuals he has little to say to, indicate how he seems to be fixated on looking for something that is not there.
The beauty of the film is that it takes this simple premise and draws from it a riveting psychological tale about the uneasy nuanced relationship that develops between the two lonely men who can never understand each other’s frustrations they are experiencing and are unable because of class differences to share their experiences. In the wintry setting of the big city, Yusuf walks the streets eyeballing young women but cannot get up enough nerve to approach them; while Mahmut throws himself completely into his work and has repressed his desires, except for noticing happier couples in a restaurant or cafe.
When Yusuf stays on for longer than expected and can’t find work because the recession has also hit the city and he doesn’t seem to be trying as hard as he should to find work, Mahmut’s temper flares from resentment and he picks unreasonable arguments with his guest for breaking the house rules over smoking, poor hygienic habits and messing up the apartment. The most dramatic event centers around a mouse hanging around the kitchen that is finally trapped in one of those sticky paper traps and is squealing as it fights for its life. Mahmut asks Yusuf to put it in a plastic bag and throw it in the trash.
It is the dead of winter. Yusuf tramps through the snow with no gloves and inadequate shoes, and his job search starts unpromisingly when the first ship he finds is listing and sinking. He haunts the coffee bars of the sailors, who smoke and wait. Mahmut, meanwhile, says goodbye to his wife and then secretly and sadly watches her leaving from the airport. He has a shabby affair with a woman who lives nearby and who will not make eye contact in a restaurant. He watches art videos (Tarkovsky) to drive Yusuf from the room and then switches to porno. The film’s funniest bit observes the artist trying to bore his cousin to bed so he can continue watching porn.
For both men, smoking is a consolation, and they spend a lot of time standing alone, doing nothing, maybe thinking nothing, smoking as if it is a task that provides them with purpose. Mahmut has rules (smoking only in the kitchen or on the balcony), but Yusuf sits in his favorite chair and smokes and drinks beer when Mahmut is away, and Mahmut grows gradually furious at the disorder that has come into his life. “Close the door,” he says as Yusuf goes to the guest bedroom, because he wants to shut him away from his privacy.
One telling scene takes place in a Beyoğlu (downtown Istanbul) cinema. The title character, played by Mehmet Emin Toprak who sadly died in a car accident shortly after this film’s completion, follows a very attractive young woman down a staircase to the cinema’s main auditorium. She goes into see Vanilla Sky. As the image of Tom Cruise is reflected from a glass, we sense that Turkish men are competing with Tom Cruise for their own women’s affections even though Tom Cruise is nowhere to be found in Beyoğlu.
A photographic expedition to the countryside driving into Anatolia in Mahmut’s new German-made SmartCar, with Yusuf hired as his assistant, turns out badly for Mahmut. While sharing rented rooms, they invade each other’s space. Finally, Mahmut has had enough and asks Yusuf, “What are your plans?” But Yusuf has none. He does not even have an opening for plans. He is trapped in unemployment, has no money, no skills, no choices. A movie like this touches everyday life in a way that we can recognize as if Turkey in 2001 was not much different that the United States in 2008 after the big recession hit here.
The film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan is shot with a frequently motionless camera with long silences. There is little these men have to say to each other and – more to the point – no one else for them to talk with. Women are a problem for them both. Yusuf shadows attractive women but is too shy to approach them before they inevitably meet a man and walk off arm-in-arm. A man without funds is in a double bind: He has no way to attract good women or to hire bad ones. The one sex scene we witness with Mahmut, which is out of focus at the far end of a room, is so joyless that solitude seems preferable.
The scenes shot across the Bosphorus shores are also quite revealing as they symbolize the beauty, yet desperate empty gulfs, which are a painful fact of life in Turkey. In this film, the gulf separates lovers and families. Distant captures the essence of Turkish life quite remarkably. The film was the winner of the Gran Prix at Cannes in 2003. Muzaffer Özdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak shared Best Actor honors at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival for their perfectly nuanced performances as (respectively) divorced, 40-something photographer Mahmut and his distant relative Yusef, In the context of this film, it’s tragically ironic that Toprak was killed in an auto accident, at age 28, six months before his honors at Cannes.)
