Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 3, 2015

  • Winter Sleep

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kış Uykusu

    Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2014)

    Based on short stories by Chekhov (I don’t know which ones), this is a long film (196 minutes).  But Winter Sleep isn’t at all difficult to sit through:  the dialogue is abundant and, from the start, the interactions between characters are closely observed and dynamic.  Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who, as usual, co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Ebru, wastes no time in setting up storylines.  Aydin, the middle-aged owner of a hotel in the mountains of Cappadocia, is asked by one of his guests about the horses that feature on the hotel’s website.  (The old Persian name for this region of Anatolia is Katpatuka – ‘the land of beautiful horses’.)  Aydin replies that the hotel doesn’t actually have any horses but his next move is go out and buy (a wild) one; he evidently feels the need not to disappoint his customers.  Aydin owns, as well as the hotel, several properties in the vicinity; as he’s going round the area with his driver Hidayet, he’s startled by a rock that crashes through the car window.  The rock-thrower is a young boy called Ilyas, the son of one of Aydin’s tenant families.  Ilyas’s father, Ismail, has recently been in prison and the family is behind with the rent:  their television and refrigerator have already been confiscated and they’re being threatened with eviction from the property.  (The removal of possessions has been carried out on the landlord’s behalf – an unsurprising arrangement but an early suggestion, nevertheless, of the distance Aydin puts between himself and other people.)  The purchase of the horse is strange and upsetting (see below).  The projectile through the car window is ominous.  The two narrative threads combine to draw the viewer in.

    When the action moves back inside the hotel, Nuri Bilge Ceylan reveals more of Aydin’s background and relationships – with his much younger wife, Nihal, and his sister, Necla, who has broken up with her husband and is living at her brother’s place.  Perhaps Aydin is too many things:  as well as a hotelier and landowner, he’s a former actor, a self-regarding intellectual, and a would-be author.  His career in theatre and film is, not unexpectedly, a clue to Aydin’s mask-wearing and his tendency towards pretence:  he’s writing a history of Turkish theatre but one of the last shots of Winter Sleep suggests he hasn’t yet progressed beyond the title of his magnum opus.  What Aydin does write regularly is a column for a local newspaper.  He takes pride in this – in what he sees as public expressions of his freethinking, although the examples he reads out to his sister suggest these opinion pieces are both pompous and facile (and they irritate Necla).  For Turkish speakers, the ironically symbolic side of Aydin must be more obvious:  his name translates as ‘enlightened’.  The lines the Ceylans have written for him are, however, much less obviously critical of the man than the above implies and Haluk Bilginer is wonderfully alert and varied in the role:  he captures very well Aydin’s mixture of self-involvement, condescension and (it seemed to me) basic decency and charm.

    The long dialogues involving Aydin, Necla (Demet Akbag) and Nihal (Melisa Sozen) are remarkable.  This is partly because they are so long, and include much discussion of differences of philosophical and literary opinion. (This is especially true of the first conversation between Aydin and Necla:  the meaning of what it means to ‘resist evil’, and whether it’s right to do so, which Necla raises here, percolates subsequent exchanges between her and Nihal, and between Nihal and Aydin.)  The exchanges are remarkable also because the movement of Ceylan’s camera subtly and acutely captures the shifts in mood and in the balance of power that occur during the characters’ arguments – these conversational sequences are never static except when stasis is the dramatic point.  You do feel afterwards, though, that a main purpose of the dialogues has been to ‘expose’ Aydin’s evasiveness or the other shortcomings for which his wife and sister take him to task.  (The fact that Necla is never seen again once she’s said her piece rather reinforces this.)

    I felt Aydin was being given a hard time by characters who were themselves hard to like or admire.  My sympathies were with him too because Haluk Bilginer’s performance is much richer than that of either of the main actresses concerned.  This is a particular problem with Melisa Sozen as the wife:  Nihal complains to Aydin that she has ‘withered’ as a result of their marriage but Sozen doesn’t suggest a thwarted intelligence or vivacity – it’s hard to believe that Nihal was ever anything but a beautiful whinger.  She takes it into her head to solve the financial problems of Ismail’s family, by giving them a large amount of money she received from Aydin as a donation to the charity in which she’s active (an involvement that crystallises the tensions between her and her husband).  In the climax to the episode in which Nihal visits the family, Nejat Isler as Ismail is superb in his response to her offer of money but you never feel the desperate impetuousness which caused Nihal to act in this way:  you feel rather that she’s silly, and that Aydin wasn’t entirely wrong when he patronisingly told his wife she wasn’t capable of administering donations to the charity.

    The horse that Aydin acquires is a troubling element of Winter Sleep in more ways than one.  I flinched during trailers of the film at the sight of the animal being captured and dragged from a river, and stumbling up the bank.  (Towards the end, there’s also a shot of a mortally wounded rabbit, shot by Aydin, which looks horribly real.  There are online reports, dating from mid-2014, that Ceylan was sued for cruelty to animals during the filming but no indication of the outcome of the lawsuit[1].)  The longest and bitterest exchange between Aydin and Nihal results in his decision to leave the hotel for a while and spend the remainder of the winter in Istanbul.  Before setting out, he releases the horse back into the wild.  This more or less coincides with the departure from the hotel of the guest who first inquired about horses but Aydin’s act seems to mean something symbolically larger and more pretentious.  The horse that he purchased is the epitome of his affluent, constructed life; the showdown with Nihal has proven the falsity of that life and caused Aydin to accept that it can’t be sustained.  Snowfall begins in earnest at the same time:  this comes to represent a lifetime’s accumulation of mistakes and deceits and the snow hasn’t cleared when the film ends.  Aydin eventually decides against trying to get to Istanbul:  this is meant to signify a loss of nerve on his part but the travel disruption caused by the bad weather – the roads are impassable, the airport is closed and there are hardly any trains – makes his decision seem only rational.  (Indeed, it’s his initial determination to make the journey that seems odd, especially when it prompts surprisingly few queries from his driver.)  In other words, there’s something of a conflict between the metaphorical and the realistic aspects of Aydin’s being snowbound.  There’s no doubt, though, that Ceylan and his cinematographer, Gokhan Tiryaki, are very successful in creating metaphorically resonant landscapes:  the image of Aydin staring up the empty railway track with nothing else in sight but snow has stayed with me.

    Ceylan also includes some very effective smaller details to convey both Aydin’s carelessness and the threat of his world disintegrating:  he forgets what he’s said to more than one of those closest to him; he’s affable with reassuringly temporary hotel guests but they appear to be few and both of those with whom Aydin talks regularly take their leave in the course of the story.  Perhaps Winter Sleep as a whole is less than the sum of its parts (a consequence of adapting multiple short stories to make a cinematic novel?) but there are some great parts – like the scene in which Aydin and Hidayet (Aybert Pekcan) arrive at and sit in the freezing railway station waiting room and, especially, a subsequent evening of drinking at the house of Suavi (Tamar Levent), an elderly man who’s known Aydin many years.  Aydin takes refuge there both from the bad weather and in order to hide his failure to travel to Istanbul.  He and Suavi are joined by the schoolteacher Levent (Nadir Saribacak), a particularly active member of the committee for Nihal’s charity.  The drunken acting by Haluk Bilginer and Tamar Levent is some of the best I’ve seen; the whole episode is a brilliantly textured description both of in vino veritas and of the merely daft things that people say under the influence.   The fine cast also includes Emirhan Doruktutan as the quiet, worrying Ilyas and Serhat Mustafa Kilic as his uncle Hamdi, an anxiously ingratiating imam.

    27 November 2014

    [1]  http://tinyurl.com/pkkjjhe

     

  • Catch Me Daddy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Wolfe (2014)

    The trailers at Curzon Victoria before the screening of Catch Me Daddy included one for Gerard Johnson’s Hyena, which opened last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival and which I’d hoped had sunk without trace.  Daniel Wolfe’s debut feature, which he co-wrote with his brother Matthew, is a better and much less obnoxious piece of work than Hyena but there are similarities.  Both films use as their basis well-known and topical social-criminal problems:  drug trafficking combined with police corruption in Hyena; ‘honour’ killings in the British Asian community in Catch Me Daddy.  In each case, the locations are well chosen and convincing.  Gerard Johnson and Daniel Wolfe exploit these realistic elements of story and physical setting to give the impression of telling penetrating truths about life in contemporary Britain – and to lend credibility to plots contrived to include numerous sequences of bloody violence.  Both directors end their film with uncharacteristic restraint – or evasiveness – at a point just before the climactic gruesomeness seems set to occur.

    Whereas Hyena soon shows its meretricious hand, the early scenes of Catch Me Daddy are slow-moving.  A young woman called Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) has run away from her Pakistani family and is living in a caravan on the moors outside a West Yorkshire town with her white boyfriend Aaron (Conor McCarron).  In the caravan, they talk, drink and eat cake (Black Forest gateau – which Laila remembers fondly from childhood as a fixture on the menu at her father’s restaurant).  They smoke (soft?) drugs, play and, in Laila’s case, dance to music.  She has a job at a local hairdresser’s; Aaron is meant to be looking for work too but he spends the day in the caravan, getting stoned.  (The film’s action takes place over the course of little more than twenty-four hours:  I’m assuming the early stages describe the recently-established routine of the couple’s lives.)   Aaron may be shiftless but he sees himself as in charge – to the extent of forbidding Laila from going clubbing with the hairdresser and her friends.  Laila’s life with Aaron, although it has moments of pleasure, seems, while it’s on the screen, mostly dismal – you wonder if it was worth escaping to.  By the end of Catch Me Daddy, their existence in the caravan feels like a lost paradise.

    The early scenes of Laila and Aaron are intercut with introductions to the men – two whites and four South Asians, including Laila’s brother Zaheer (Ali Ahmad) – who are looking, on behalf of her father, to track Laila down.  The two parts of the search party communicate but they also appear to compete with each other.  The whites confirm where Laila is working but the South Asians aren’t prepared to wait for the hairdresser to re-open next day; under cover of darkness, they home in on the caravan while Laila is alone there – Aaron has popped out to buy some drinks and snacks.  Zaheer insists on going into the caravan alone.  In a struggle with Laila, he falls through a glass table and cuts his throat fatally.  Meanwhile, one of the white men stands in wait for Aaron outside the convenience store where he’s shopping:   Aaron realises this and manages to elude the man by chucking liquid in his face.  Aaron and Laila then go on the run.  This is just the start of a terrifying night.

    I don’t know how often white thugs have actually been involved in carrying out Asian honour killings.  When he reviewed the film in Cannes last year, Peter Bradshaw suggested ‘an unspoken agreement that the white guys are there to handle the white transgressor while the South Asian men will deal their errant daughter [sic]’ but the involvement of the white duo, Tony (Gary Lewis) and Barry (Barry Nunney), although crucial to the scheme of Catch Me Daddy, isn’t convincing.  Its purpose is to allow a compare-and-contrast view of the ethnically different elements of the posse and to increase the permutations for violence.  Barry, after beating and kicking Aaron to death, is killed in a skirmish with one of the surviving South Asians.  This happens inside their car; the trio (Anwar Hussain, Adrian Hussain, Shoby Kasam) then drag Barry’s body outside the car and run over it, twice.  (To be fair to Daniel Wolfe, you don’t see the corpse at this stage – only the car.)

    The locale and the look of Catch Me Daddy, photographed by Robbie Ryan, are impressive in various ways.  In an early sequence, Laila and Aaron walk across moorland, in daylight.  They’re chatting and laughing in the big, bleak landscape.  The image stays in your mind when, in pitch darkness, they’re stumbling across the moors, desperately trying to escape their pursuers.  The landscape of motorways, fast food joints, minicab offices and convenience stores has a strongly anomic quality.  (When Aaron gets a drink from a machine, it arrives in one of those crappy mushroom-coloured plastic cups.  I remember them from the 1970s and was almost shocked they were still in circulation.)  In comparison, Daniel Wolfe’s repeated shots of fish in tanks and lizards in glass containers stick out as superfluous arty touches.  An early episode, in which Laila is given a two-for-one milk shakes offer by a kid in the street and goes to use it, has both a documentary and a dramatic charge, thanks to the seemingly stoned boy in the shop who prepares the milk shakes.   Wolfe conveys strongly but, for the most part unemphatically, the near-ubiquity of drug-taking in the lives he’s describing – climaxing in a middle-of-the-night visit by Tony to his pusher, en route to returning Laila to her father.  The music in the film, both the original score by Daniel Thomas Freeman and Matthew Wolfe (under the name Matthew Watson) and the selection of songs played on radios and so on, is interesting.

    Sameena Jabeen Ahmed does well as Laila.  Since the script requires her almost continuously to express extremes – druggy torpor, terror, traumatised silence, final horrified misery – it’s hard to tell what kind of actress she might be playing within a more normal range.  Laila’s experiences are too much for one night – so much so that you get past the point of expecting Ahmed to express convincing reactions.  I hadn’t seen Conor McCarron since Neds (and couldn’t place him while I was watching Catch Me Daddy).  The plot twists involving Aaron, in combination with McCarron’s acting, make him the most surprising character in the film.  The resource that he shows in trying to get himself and Laila away from their hunters is, after Aaron’s lethargy in the opening scenes, particularly unexpected – McCarron’s naturally alert quality makes it believable.  It’s an effective twist too when the South Asians hold his mother (Kate Dickie) hostage – this is enough for Aaron to accept that Leila must be returned to her father.  The most experienced, best-known actor in the cast is Gary Lewis, whose Tony is bounty-hunting mainly to keep himself supplied with cocaine.  Lewis is quietly eloquent throughout:  he suggests Tony’s conflicted feelings, a battle between urgent need and conscience, well before these are expressed in his actions.

    Laila is eventually returned to her father Tariq (Wasim Zakir) at his balti house.  Tariq veers between expressions of tearful, regretful affection for his daughter and violence towards her – especially once he discovers what has happened to his son.  Tariq hangs a noose from the ceiling and forces Laila to stand on a chair and put her head through the noose.  When the screen cuts to black, Laila is weeping.  I assumed her situation was now so grim that she would kick the chair away to end her life and that the words ‘catch me daddy’, perhaps unspoken, would be in her mind as she did so.  (I read that the film is named for a Janis Joplin song.)  I understand why Catch Me Daddy has been well received but some of what’s been written is almost more alarming than the film itself.  One thing which has impressed several critics is the echoes of John Ford’s The Searchers:  Daniel Wolfe’s film begins as a ‘kitchen sink riff’ on Ford, according to Tara Brady in the Irish Times.  This kind of reference, as well as displaying the reviewer’s movie knowledge, appears to enable them to put distance between themselves and the mayhem on screen that, to me, is an unignorable and oppressive feature of Catch Me Daddy.  Peter Bradshaw, who also picks up on the Ford connection, praises the film as ‘a fierce and boldly questioning drama about tribal politics and gender politics in contemporary Britain’, and suggests that ‘some may find’ the ending of Catch Me Daddy ‘all too much’.  Bradshaw can obviously take it, however.  I’m not sure if I’m more envious of or worried by film critics who have the facility to reassure themselves – as Gerard Johnson, at the EIFF, advised the Hyena audience to reassure themselves – that what they’re watching is only a movie.

    3 March 2015

Posts navigation