Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkish chronicler of his countrymen’s psychological strife, won the Palme d’Or at the 67th Cannes Film Festival for his new film Winter Sleep. The accolade, announced last Saturday at the wrap of the world’s most influential movie festival, was well deserved. For this director has been orbiting the stratosphere of art cinema for over a decade now, his oeuvre some of the strongest work being produced by contemporary film-makers.
Haluk Bilginer and Melisa Sozen in Winter Sleep, by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 67th Cannes Film Festival.
Winter Sleep cemented Ceylan’s status as a master. But it all started with his 2002 film Distant, made when he was 43, which won the runner-up prize in Cannes and put his name on the A-list. That forlorn, haunting, coming-home movie gave us a glimpse of what was to follow in Ceylan’s career: an aesthetic of patient, unhurried build-up, precise framing, gloomy landscapes, and characters who have to deal with inner conflicts, particularly domestic anxieties and urban-rural tensions. The existential gap between intellectual aloofness and the mundane reality of provincial Turkey is the motif in Distant, in which a photographer returns from the city to his snow-covered hometown. It is also the dominant theme in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, in which a doctor drives along a deserted road with a rural policemen trying to solve a murder case; and also in Winter Sleep, in which a former theatre actor leaves Istanbul and returns to the poverty-stricken region of his birth where he nurtures his fantasy of being a pseudo-scholar while persecuting his young wife whom he regards as intellectually inferior.
Ceylan’s films are always conceived with cerebral heft — rather like good Russian literature — but he has also crafted some of the most memorable images, shots that can stay with you for years afterwards: the man walking across the blindingly white, snow-covered plains in Distant; the foreboding, hyper-realistic skies in Three Monkeys; the nocturnal car ride on a winding road in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia; and the twinkling village clinging to the face of a craggy mountain in Winter Sleep. In addition to the influence of Soviet film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky, Ceylan often injects a whiff of Kafka-esque parable into his stories, while his frequent return to the theme of martial unease often evokes John Cassavetes. He also subscribes to the idea of cinema as a landscape of faces: his characters, especially in recent movies, loom large in the frame, often lit by the flickering glow of candlelight or the funereal rays of a wintry sun.
In Cannes, prior to the screening of Winter Sleep, critics expected more of the same from Ceylan: a heavy (perhaps occasionally boring) “slow cinema” offering where many things are oblique. Which it is, certainly; but, at the same time, it isn’t. While Winter Sleep pursues a direction the film-maker has followed in a previous work of his, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (which won a runner-up prize at Cannes in 2011), he has actually managed to sharpen the focus. The new film is structured around a series of long conversations between the characters — the ex-actor who now runs a small hotel, his young wife, his condescending sister, the local imam and his family members. The way Ceylan’s script works is to peel off these people’s hypocrisy, worry, class-based anxieties, and allow us to see if humanity and forgiveness are still possible in unlikely situations. Like his previous film — and more than his earlier work — Winter Sleep has a Chekovian depth to it, and the lengthy dialogues in which the characters engage have an almost Shakespearan quality to them (the bard’s name does get a mention, actually). While Once Upon a Time in Anatolia attains a mystical power through geography and tragedy, Winter Sleep takes us to find the remaining shreds of redemptive salvation in its characters, both rich and poor.
That’s why he truly deserved that Palme d’Or. The most recent edition of the Cannes Film Festival was, as usual, a gathering of past alumni, and while we can indulge in hip dismissals of such familiar names as Jean-Luc Godard, the Dardenne brothers, Mike Leigh, Olivier Assasyas and Ceylan (all of them had films in the competition category), the win by Winter Sleep assures us that the old-timers are still going strong, if not even stronger than before (in some cases). Godard’s dazzling mash-up, Goodbye to Language, is a case in point; this is an 84-year-old guy who’s still trying to test the limits of cinema, and his film, a 3D essay on narrative, ideas, history, mischief and images, was a festival firework. As Ceylan keeps polishing his style, striving to make what he does best even better, Godard’s new film is a definite argument against blasé predictions about the supposedly imminent death of cinema.
To a lesser extent, that can also be said about the young mavericks who also picked up prizes last Saturday. Alice Rohrwacher from Italy, 32, won the Grand Prix, the runner-up, with a heartfelt rural tale called Le Meraviglie. But this year the real sensation at Cannes, besides Godard’s no-show at his own screening, was the brash energy of the 25-year-old Quebecois Xavier Dolan, who presented his film Mommy to the delight of most critics. Mixing melodrama, stylistic show-off (it was shot on 1:1 ratio, like on your phone) and a kind of controlled hysteria, Mommy tells the story of a single mother and her ADHD teenage son. Some saw this as a breakthrough for such a young director, others scorned Dolan’s overwrought, button-pushing strategy (I’m among the latter).
Still, in one of the most controversy-baiting decisions by the jury, led by Jane Campion, Cannes decided that Godard’s Goodbye to Language should share the Jury Prize with Mommy (a kind of honorary kudos). The ageing master and the young upstart — some would say Dolan and the veteran Swiss director are kindred spirits — were given equal recognition on the same stage. Godard didn’t come, of course, but Dolan gave a long, bordering-on-tearful speech about his love of cinema. It was both sincere and touching, though I wish he’d remembered to thank Godard too, because movies would’ve been pretty boring without Godard’s input and the kind of cinematic risk that Dolan is now taking wouldn’t have been remotely possible.
