A wisp of smoke pluming from the tussock, this is the opening shot ofNuri Bilge Ceylan’sPalme d’or winning tome WINTER SLEEP, and it impeccably recapitulates what Ceylan angles to reify: the cosmically intangible yet intrinsically tangible incapability of communication among us humans.
Our protagonist is the salt-and-pepper, middle-aged Aydin (Bilginer), a quondam thespian (a term which he prefers than“actor”), who runs a mountaintop hotel called“Othello” inCappadocia of the Central Anatolia. For those who are au fait with Ceylan’s track record and artistic felicity, it comes as an invigorating surprise to see a concise-to-wordy volte-face here, as this 196-minutes saga is chiefly composed of long-winded conversation segments (with no embellishment of accompaniments to boot), only intermediately larded with its ongoing actions andthe sublime, postcard-ready shots of the magnificent topography of the locale, which is able to rouse even the most torpid wanderlust out of hibernation, Ceylan assures us its natural beauty is unadulterated and the film would land on its feet eventually through its dramaturgic toil.
With winter looming around, the hotel business is in its troughs, but Aydin’s sedate life is slowly descending into a personal quagmire due to both in-house and extraneous forces. The crisis within is the irreconcilable rift between him and his closest kin, namely his divorced sister Necla (Akbag, coalescing a languid easiness with sharp-edged spite) and his wife Nihal (Sözan), who is only half of his age. Their first debate is about Necla’s“not resisting evil” supposition, an airy-fairy notion completely throws oneself on the mercy of other’s quarter, before soon it exacerbates into many a personal snide, between Necla and Nihal firstly, then a protracted sibling verbal sparring adding insult to injury, fromintrospectively dialectical to deliberately catty, Ceylan hits home with his onion-peeling relentlessness to censure a detrimental propensity amongintelligentsia: constantly attempting to earn one-upmanship by thinly-veiled denigration. Apparently, Aydin wins this round and Necla willfully takes her bow and never returns thenceforth.
The meat of Aydin and Nihal’s nuptial rub comes to the fore later, starkly chaste, their relationship has already been on the rocks for years, Nihal tries to ease her“trophy wife” shame by plunging into a fundraising business for schools and children, refusing Aydin’s interference of any kind, apart from accepting his anonymous charity from time to time. She cannot bear his non-threatening but chronically encroaching superciliousness, yet has no moxie to put the kibosh on their marriage in gridlock. As for Aydin, he sees all too well of Nihal’s fix and cunningly barters his subservience for her entrapment“I love you, and I know you don’t love me, but you cannot get your cake and eat it too!”, that is the connotation. The cruel manifestation of selfish love from those who are endowed with clout and money. And later in a convo with a local teacher Levent (Saribacak, exemplifies cogently how to shoot the booze-emboldened sideswipes), which goes argumentative, Aydin seemingly has the final say with a caustic rejoinder but the subsequent spewing betrays that an inward damage is done.
Outwardly, it is the gap between castes that writs large and cannot be mediated, the family of Aydin’s hard-up tenants, brothers Hamdi (Kiliç) and Ismail (Isler) cannot pay their rent on time and the ensuing dispute becomes rather ugly, and when a broken car window impels Hamdi to humble himself in front of a condescending Aydin, the Janus-faced reality seeps into the scenario in both castes, from smile to curse, from bonhomie to grumbling, all in a trice, even Aydin’s chauffeur/assistant Hidayet (Pekcan), who is not above to hector those less fortunate tenants, but meanwhile has to carry all his master’s luggage in a snowfall day, with the latter wandering with idle hands, so it is not surprising to see him one minute ago promise to keep a secret at the behest of Aydin and the next minute, casually divulges it to another party on the phone, the well-adjusted equilibrium between obedience and defiance is all too close to home.
Indubitably, WINTER SLEEP is first and foremost, an actor’s showpiece, leading actorHaluk Bilginer competently hammers out his delivery on the strength of his word-wielding expertise and telegraphs Aydin’s inscrutable train of thought when lines are not proffered.Melisa Sözen, on the other hand, brilliantly portrays a more emotionally readable persona and her best scenes are in the cathartic episode, when Nihal tries to use money to buy her conscience in front of a seethingNejat Isler (emotive with a commensurate restraint, upstaging the rest in his two scenes), and the story reaches its apogee, but in post-mortem, it is a missing opportunity that Ceylon doesn’t apply his“not resisting evil” theory for a trial run here, which in return points up Ceylon’s own guarded and idealized stance of the have-nots: they are willing to die for dignity, the only remnant left for them to weaponize.
An illuminating stew of the perennial vagaries (religion, philosophy, morality and class stratification, etc.) obstructing our day-to-day communications, WINTER SLEEP mark’s Ceylon’s highest achievement so far for his profound perspective in fleshing out a conundrum that is elementally complex and sophisticatedly widespread.
referential points: Ceylan’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (2011, 8.2/10), Andrey Zvyagintsev’sLEVIATHAN (2014, 7.7/10).
