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 Distant Production NotesA photographer who is haunted by the feeling that the gap between his ideals and his real life is growing finds himself obliged to put up in his apartment a young relative who has left behind his village looking for a job aboard a ship in Istanbul to go abroad.
Mahmut is a relatively successful commercial photographer who has been struggling to come to terms with the growing gap between his artisitc ideals and his professional obligations.
His tedious workload, coupled with the lingering loss he still feels for his ex-wife (newly married and on the verge of leaving Istanbul for Canada), leaves Mahmut clinging to the melancholic and obsessive routines of solitary life. Without warning, Mahmut's distant relative Yusuf arrives in Istanbul determined to find a job aboard a ship so that he may fulfill his dream of traveling around the world.
In need of a place to stay as he searches for work, Yusuf imposes himself on Mahmut, who resents the sudden intrusion, but nonetheless feels obliged to help his family. It doesn't take long for Yusuf to discover that the the work he is looking for isn't available, but he manages to prolong his stay by formulating stories that would suggest otherwise.
His hope waning, Yusuf resorts to spending his days drifting through the streets of Istanbul, slowly coming to the realization that without work he may soon need to return home. Mahmut tries to help by offering him a job as his assistant during a photography shoot, but the fix is temporary. As the two men struggle to make a connection, communication is slowly reduced to bare minimum, and their time together must come to an end.
After garnering three major awards at this year’s Istanbul Film Festival, Nuri Bilge Ceylan went on to scoop the Grand Jury prize in Cannes, testament to the quality and assurance of his contemplative style of film-making. Ceylan makes art cinema at its most fully realised, languidly paced and unafraid to let the camera just sit back and observe. Here he shifts location from the rural environs of his two previous films (his second, Clouds in May screened here in 2000), moving to modern Istanbul, rendered as a beautifully desolate snow cloaked city.
A young man from the country arrives at the house of his cousin, an older photographer. Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) is hoping to find work at the docks and eventually to board a ship as a sailor. Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozedimer) takes him in, despite the disruption to his ordered and solitary life. What follows is an eloquently detailed series of small episodes in which the passive, uncommunicative young man and his obsessive older relative try to get along together.
Given the sheer visual force of his films, it’s tempting to think that landscape is what Ceylan does best (and his films do provoke no end of painterly comparisons). But in Distant, he combines aesthetic minimalism with an acutely observed study of character, to present a film of infinite sadness and longing.
Movie Review: Universal history where loneliness, disillusion and despair mix
Down and out in Istanbul. Distant, the third film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who in addition wrote the script and was in charge of editing, draws a bitter portrait of a country struck by crisis. Through two existences without a possible future, the director tells a universal history where loneliness, disillusion and despair mix.
The reel amplifies the sound of shoes on snow. A man advances towards the foreground. From fields to the road, a village to the city, unemployment to the hope of getting a job. Slowly, the man advances on the white expanse.
From the first sequence, what is striking about Ceylan's filming is time and discretion. This director takes care to disappear in order for his camera to view the faces and the movements of his characters.
He takes the time to wait for the emotion that will emerge from the corner of a wrinkle on the face, from an absent glance inhabited by interior demons. He patiently lurks in a corridor, until the moment when the accident occurs: the simple appearance of a protagonist in the camera's shot. An effective tactic, since the comedy of one situation, like the tragedy of another, rewards the audience's patience each time that he goes to the trouble to wait. Contrary to the characters, who spy on their fellow man only to find nothingness and sadness. And when the distress is read on the faces, when it is delivered very naked to the eyes, then the director caresses it with his camera. Without separating himself from a certain decency, from a humble and sincere tenderness for these lost beings. Alone in a cosmopolitan city where happiness will be always reserved for the others, alone among thousands, such are the two main characters of Distant.
Mahmut works as photographer, primarily for a tile factory. His days are spread out with the tedious rhythm of paper filing, amorphous channel surfing and meetings with prostitutes, in the middle of clichés that testify to a more artistic past. Without passion or joy, just with a hardly assumed fate. His mother suffers from a disease, his ex-wife emigrates to Canada in a few days with her new man. One day Yusuf, a member of his family who's left the village to try his luck in Istanbul in the merchant navy, arrives at his home. Thus begins a cohabitation where communication is reduced to the bare minimum.
Yusuf's mother, penniless, cannot pay the dentist to cure her of a toothache, the office of port recruiting closes its doors to him, and Mahmut does not encourage him to stay at his place too long. Then he feigns waiting for answers from potential employers, hangs out in the streets, in the bars, not by vice, just by boredom and spite, and all his attempts to make some acquaintances (the opposite sex, if possible) fall through. The two broken beings of Distant are not very talkative. Because fatigue and lassitude took over their pugnacity. Without existence in a society in crisis, Yusuf disappears from the last place where he could have existed at least in the eyes of his silent relative, as he came: without announcing himself, without warning.
As for Mahmut, his photographer's look expresses all the lassitude that accumulates in his life. Witness the startling scene where, during a tour in Anatolia, he refuses to stop to take a cliché photo where all the elements, from the scenery to the light, would have contributed to make a work of art. The most beautiful moments of film shows him seated on a bench, in front of the Bosphorus raging from winter. In front of so much of resignation, of will to face the pain without saying a word, Ceylan shows a violent, indifferent nature without pity: the waves striking the quay. Mahmut's eyes remain dry. The only trace of his cousin's passing through: a package of cigarettes. A fleeting trace, which will leave in ashes with the last puff. - Moland Fengkov
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Muzaffer Ozdemir as Mahmut in Distant.