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.”
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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, as in the Russian 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.”
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 Sleep is one of the top 10 films of the author in 2014. Three Monkeys (2008) and Once 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's Leviathan (2014) and Nichol's Who'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
