Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Masterpiece of Existential Angst
His moody 2004 film, ‘Distant,’ about an unemployed factory worker in Istanbul, has been revived for a short run at Film Forum in Manhattan.The miracle of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Distant” is that it is continually absorbing, even when not much is happening — which is most of the time. A photographer before he became the dean of Turkish filmmakers, Ceylan is a master of existential angst and transfigured dailiness whose movies invite contemplation.Revived for a week at Film Forum in a new digital restoration, “Distant” — which opened in the United States in 2004, having won the second-highest prize at Cannes — looks even better than I remembered.The brief precredit sequence is emblematic of Ceylan’s style. A tiny figure trudges across a snowy field in what feels like real time, accompanied by ambient sounds. This is followed by a slow pan to the road, slightly in advance of the vehicle that will take him to Istanbul. Immanence is all.An unemployed factory worker, Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) arrives in the city with vague hopes of shipping out to sea. While shambolically looking for a job, he stays with his older cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a commercial photographer with abandoned artistic aspirations. (If Mahmut might be the director’s unflattering self-portrait, Yusuf was played by Ceylan’s actual cousin, tragically killed in a car crash before the movie’s release.)Sufficiently affluent to indulge his alienation, Mahmut has a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood, but his emotions are as frozen as the snow that blanket the city. “Distant” often feels directed by the weather. (Ceylan’s next film, about a marital breakup in which he co-starred with his wife, was titled “Climates.”)Each frustrated in his own way, the cousins can barely relate. Yusuf is a bit of a bumpkin. Mahmut is a grouch who spends most evenings sacked out in front of his TV (switching from a Tarkovsky movie to — when Yusuf leaves the room — porn). Mahmut’s immobility is parodied by the sticky tape he puts down nightly in hopes of trapping the mouse that lives in his kitchen.Although his mood of rapt sadness is his own, Ceylan has affinities to Michelangelo Antonioni (feel for bourgeois estrangement), Yasujiro Ozu (exquisite, unshowy compositions), Robert Bresson (precise use of sound) and even Jacques Tati (deadpan humor).Pervaded with a sense of apprehension, “Distant” seems to promise a crime — not least because Yusuf has a practice of following women in the street. In one mordant joke, he trails a woman into a park, inadvertently makes eye contact with another lurker, then hastily conceals himself when the woman’s date shows up.The transgression finally comes from an act of omission, rather commission, so mean and petty as to seem earthshaking. As the fate of the mouse suggests, Ceylan has a feel for understated symbols. The New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell, although generally unenthusiastic (“almost like a droll take on ‘The Odd Couple’”), did acknowledge that “Distant” required a second viewing “to work its spell.”In the final scene, Mahmut sits alone by the harbor, smoking a cigarette from a pack Yusuf left behind. His anguish is palpable. There’s no particular reason to feel sorry for this guy except he’s human and alone.DistantMay 20-26 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org. More
