Three Monkeys
Üç Maymun
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2008)
The opening is dramatically fast-moving. A middle-aged man is driving at night and struggling to stay awake. His car disappears into the darkness. We hear a screech of brakes and a crash. In the next shot, a body is lying in a road and the driver we saw before runs, horrified, back to his car at the roadside. He crouches behind the vehicle as another car approaches and stops by the body. We hear the voices of the couple in the second car. The man thinks he should check whether the man lying in the road is still alive; the woman that they should simply take the number plate of the car and report it to the police. They drive away and the first driver reappears from behind his car. There’s a baleful crack of thunder. The camera cuts to another middle-aged man, taking a late night call on his mobile phone in a small apartment; then to a daytime shot of this man and the car driver sitting on a park bench. It transpires that Servet, the man who fell asleep at the wheel, is a politician running for office and the other man, Eyüp, is his employee – indeed his driver. The fatal accident that Servet has caused will obviously ruin his political career so he asks Eyüp to tell the police that it was he who was driving the car, as he usually does. Servet reassures Eyüp that he’ll get no more than a year in prison and that Servet will see that he’s handsomely paid for his trouble. Eyüp agrees to take the rap. He goes home; we see him sitting on a bed and preparing to tell his wife, who’s asleep, what’s happened. The next time we see Eyüp, he’s in prison.
I’m not capable of fully appreciating, let alone describing, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film-making technique but I can see that Three Monkeys is technically accomplished (the film won Ceylan the Best Director prize at Cannes in 2008). I do wonder though how much one’s awareness of the artistry – or, at least, artfulness – of Ceylan’s images is increased by the snail’s pace of the narrative after those first remarkable ten minutes of screen time. (This is the kind of film that moves slowly enough to give Sight & Sound reviewers time to make detailed notes of all the references to other art films they can spot before a shot changes.) Once Eyüp is behind bars the focus shifts to his wife, Hacer, and their son, Ismail. The son fails a college exam and wants money to set up a car service, ferrying local children to and from a crèche. Hacer agrees to ask Servet for an advance on the payoff Eyüp is due to receive on his release from prison. Servet agrees to this but it seems clear he’ll want something from Hacer in return. The scenes of Hacer and Ismail in the family’s cramped Istanbul apartment are well observed but there’s not much to observe and, although Ceylan builds a kind of tension, it’s a tension that derives largely from the lack of much happening and our natural expectations – bolstered by that opening – that something is going to happen. In this stiflingly becalmed atmosphere, any event will tend to be experienced as a powerful release and so it proves. Ismail sets out to visit Eyüp in prison. Waiting for his train on a station platform, he feels groggy and throws up. The phrase ‘violently sick’ is appropriate here – the effect is explosive and very ominous. Ismail has to go back to the apartment to change his shirt. It’s while he’s there that he hears noises from his parents’ bedroom, including a male smoker’s cough; he looks through the keyhole and sees Servet with his mother (although we don’t see them at this point).
Three Monkeys has one of those giveaway ‘intelligent’ titles (the Un coeur en hiver syndrome) – although it might just as well be called something like ‘Practise to Deceive’ and the title isn’t entirely right anyway. The progress of the story depends crucially on characters not always turning a blind eye or a deaf ear or keeping quiet about what’s going on. Ismail is on the edge of being violent with his mother when he finds out about her affair; the film’s climax revolves around his subsequently murdering Servet and the aftermath. There’s a knife-edge balance between what Eyüp suppresses and expresses in a prolonged and gruelling bedroom scene between him and Hacer on his release from prison. It’s become clear to Eyüp that his wife has been having an affair with Servet: the desire to have sex with his wife again keeps colliding with Eyüp’s wanting to punish her unfaithfulness. Quibbles about the title aside, my main problem with Three Monkeys was that I didn’t feel Nuri Bilge Ceylan was saying anything believable about human psychology or behaviour – although his authority as a film-maker will lead many to think otherwise.
On the night of his release from prison, Eyüp goes to a local tea house and talks with a man called Bayram, who not only works but sleeps there because he has nowhere else to go. This is just about the only conversation any of the four main characters has with anyone else in the course of the film. You feel it must therefore prove significant, and it does. After Ismail admits to killing Servet, the distraught Eyüp goes to a mosque, where he seems to find some solace. He then approaches a police station; we assume that, once again, he’s going to take responsibility for someone else’s crime. Instead of going to the police, Eyüp goes back to the tea house and suggests to Bayram that he should admit to the killing. After all, winter is coming, there will be three square meals a day in prison, and a life sentence won’t be for life. Asking Bayram to confess to the murder seems out of character for Eyüp. There’s no other suggestion that he’s been hardened by bitter experience into becoming a self-serving pragmatist. Unlike Servet, the aspiring politician, Eyüp has no real incentive for wanting to resume the existence which the crime is threatening to interrupt. His family life has become deeply unhappy: Eyüp has imagined – or wanted to see? – Hacer throwing herself to her death from the top of the apartment block; now that Servet is dead, he’s presumably out of a job too. I thought it would have been more believable if Eyüp had again presented himself as the guilty party. Of course his proposition to Bayram is a dramatically effective moment – but that’s all it is; it’s not the revelation of a truth about people. Yet Eyüp’s act (and Bayram’s acceptance of his invitation, which we seem meant to assume) is invested with cosmic significance. The film’s last shot shows Eyüp, back at home on the little balcony of the apartment block, looking out to the sea of Marmara. It starts to rain and the thunder crack from the film’s opening is repeated, followed by lightning.
It’s possible that Three Monkeys is commenting on Turkish society in particular but, if so, I couldn’t work out exactly what points Ceylan was making. The elections in which Servet is running appear to be the Turkish general elections of July 2007, in which the incumbent, right of centre Justice and Development Party was returned to power with a huge majority – but is the moral profile of the Turkish party of government particularly associable with the cowardly abuses of power perpetrated by Servet? When Eyüp agrees to take the punishment for Servet’s crime, he seems impelled by loyalty to his boss rather than mercenary motives – or, you might say, by loyalty to his boss and the thought that his family may be better off financially in the longer term if he accepts Servet’s offer. In any case, these motives don’t seem specific to the national situation. You naturally wonder how Bayram’s confession to Servet’s murder can be accepted without there being any evidence to incriminate him (and possibly evidence to incriminate Ismail). If this is to be taken as a satirical comment on how the police operate in Istanbul, it seems rather to dilute the force of Ceylan’s comment about the moral evasiveness of Eyüp and his family.
When the camera stays on faces in close-up as long as it does here, it’s a searching examination of the actors’ truthfulness – one that Yavuz Bingöl as Eyüp and Ahmet Rıfat Şungar as Ismail pass magnificently. In spite of the rigidly mournful conception of the character, Bingöl is greatly resourceful in the layers of misery he uncovers. Şungar is remarkable – he’s rather like a louche, dark-haired version of James McAvoy, but with a sense of danger and a lot more depth. (When Ismail visits Eyüp in prison and doesn’t say what’s on his mind, Şungar’s face shows us the son’s love for his father – a suggestion, important in the prevailing gloom, that the events of the story are eroding what may have been a reasonably happy family life.) I was less taken with Hatice Aslan as Hacer; she’s striking but too dynamically furtive. The co-writer Ercan Kesal, as Servet, also overdoes the clammy facial expressions that betray the character’s moral turpitude and brutality. Apart from Bayram (Cafer Köse), there is one other significant character. This is the ghost of Ismail’s younger brother (Gürkan Aydın), who died as an infant, in unexplained circumstances, but who returns to visit Ismail and Eyüp in dreams or, at least, in the moments when they are falling asleep. These are among the most unsettling sequences in the film (especially when the child’s arm is seen in an embrace round his weeping father’s neck) – not least because the boy’s death, and what exactly this has come to mean now to the family he left behind, remains to some extent mysterious. The movement of this figure within the confines of the apartment is compelling. (Ceylan’s use of this small space is extremely skilful – although goodness knows what his previous films can be like: Jonathan Romney’s Sight and Sound piece, which the BFI used as its programme note, contrasts Three Monkeys with Ceylan’s ‘recent, claustrophobically intimate dramas’.)
On the evidence of this film, Ceylan’s intelligence as a writer (he did the screenplay with his wife Ebru Ceylan, as well as Ercan Kesal) doesn’t compare with his skill in composing images. There’s a particular problem when this happens in cinema – especially when the settings of a story are realistic and it seems to have, for example, contemporary political resonances, as Three Monkeys does. In a purely visual art form, the ways in which artists express themselves dominate the ideas which may underlie the images that express them. Cinema, although predominantly visual, clearly isn’t exclusively so. It engages with different senses and some of the judgments you make about a film are similar to those you make about a novel or a play. The trouble with (what I think of, perhaps unfairly) as the Sight and Sound school of film criticism is that it tends to assume too readily that visual sophistication equals absolute ‘mastery’ of the medium; and that, when a brilliant technician talks about the themes he or she has been preoccupied with in a particular film, it goes without saying not only that these themes have been expressed successfully in what we see but that they’re worth taking seriously – because they reflect the views of someone who can put together fascinating pictures on screen. A film like Three Monkeys is liable to be overpraised both for this reason and because it’s relentlessly, determinedly grim – as if emotional monotony were a greater artistic achievement than the tonal variety of recent American films like Milk or Rachel Getting Married. It’s noticeable too that, when metaphysical weather conditions invade a Hollywood film like Doubt, they’re ridiculed (and rightly so). When they feature in a European art film like Three Monkeys, the visual elegance confers on them an intellectual respectability they don’t deserve.
26 February 2009