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CIFF 2014: Timbuktu Review
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CIFF 2014: Winter Sleep Review

by Taylor Sinople on October 13, 2014

Is there a more brazen act of pure artistic achievement this year than “Winter Sleep” winning the Palme d’Or? After all, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (“Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”) didn’t end up with a 196-minute character study by thinking about box office figures and public approval. No, Ceylan was going to make “Winter Sleep” whether anyone liked it or not. But while an audience is always to be found at the intersection of artistic integrity and technical brilliance, it’s a special relief to see “Winter Sleep” take the top prize at Cannes, guaranteeing its success in the cinephile community and jump-starting its campaign representing Turkey at the Academy Awards in February of 2015.

There are traditional plot points at work – an unsettled debt; a broken window – but “Winter Sleep” is, above all, a dissection of conversation. The players are Mr. Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) – the gentle owner of a rural Anatolian hotel, his young wife (Melisa Sözen), his irritable sister (Demet Akbag), and a tenant that’s struggling to pay his rent (Serhat Mustafa Kiliç). The topics are seemingly everyday, but with snowfall comes fiery disagreements. Ceylan exposes the inevitability of our internal jealousies and regrets becoming external trappings.

Watching the subtle shifts in character in these sprawling, 15-20 minute long dialogue pieces is to witness a virtuoso conduct a symphony on the best night of a tour. Complex human emotion penetrates every interaction in the film. Without the use of narration, we come to understand each character’s private motivations. Mr. Aydin begins as the most sympathetic character and is broken down from there to reveal his gentleness a fault. Bilginer plays the character with naturalism beyond belief. In an interview just after the film won the Palme, the actor remarked that receiving the script “was frightening, because it was 183 pages long. It was like a New York telephone book.” The subsequent rehearsals, which were filmed at all times, resulted in 200 hours of footage – a figure that offers some insight into the work that was required to master this sort of intense volume of material.

But the length of the final film is simply a non-issue. There are about as many scenes as any shorter film, they’re simply longer. The performances are engrossing, the writing (done by Ceyland and his wife Ebru) dense, and the photography stunning. Gökhan Tiryaki’s landscape photography is as essential to a Ceylan film as any other component. Tiryaki, this time, elects to follow the naturalism of the story by locking the camera down and allowing the actors to work in full frame, long-running takes. To get around cutting between two different shots, he’ll occasionally insert a mirror into the frame to achieve two shots in a single composition.

Citing superior color accuracy, he also elected to use the Sony F65 –a rare choice next to digital giants like the Arri Alexa or RED Epic. He’s right though – the mournful landscapes of Anatolia look fantastic and the color grade appears to add contrast but leave much of the original color tones that are so important in photographing a film that hopes to achieve both cinematic and natural tones. The sandy beige of the hotel’s cave-like exterior looks beautiful soaked in the pale, winter blue light.

Cult cinema may do best when offering shocking and stylish sequences to share with friends, but art house work like Ceylan’s lives on when opening a conversation with its audience. On form, the director remarks, “[it] has the ability to make the content more mysterious, more powerful, more real, more light, to imbue it with more truth. It’s everything really.” “Winter Sleep” and its masterful dissection of subtext and the internal forces at play between two people with a storied relationship will be a present figure in the history of international cinema alongside Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage.” The audience at the Chicago International Film Festival applauded the film despite the filmmakers not actually being present to receive the applause – it was a collective celebration of cinema that’s both derived from a single artist’s heart and mind, and breathtakingly involving.

9.5 out of 10 points

Return to CIFF 2014 Coverage
Language

Turkish, English

Runtime

3 hr. 16 min.

Genre

Drama

Director

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Cast

Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sözen, Demet Akbag, Ayberk Pekcan, Serhat Mustafa Kiliç, Nejat Isler, Tamer Levent, Nadir Saribacak, Rabia Özel, Fatma Deniz Yildiz, Ekrem Ilhan, Emirhan Dorukutan

(All Features), (All Reviews), Chicago International Film Festival 2014, Drama, Event Coverage, Features, Foreign, Reviews
Ayberk Pekcanciffciff 2014Demet AkbagEkrem IlhanEmirhan DorukutanFatma Deniz YildizHaluk BilginerMelisa SözenNadir SaribacakNejat IslerNuri Bilge CeylanRabia ÖzelSerhat Mustafa KiliçTamer LeventWinter Sleep
Ayberk Pekcan, ciff, ciff 2014, Demet Akbag, Ekrem Ilhan, Emirhan Dorukutan, Fatma Deniz Yildiz, Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sözen, Nadir Saribacak, Nejat Isler, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Rabia Özel, Serhat Mustafa Kiliç, Tamer Levent, Winter Sleep
About the Author
Taylor Sinople
Taylor Sinople
Taylor is a Chicago-based writer and aspiring film historian. He is the editor here at TFP, and has contributed to a number of international publications such as Cinema Scandinavia, PopMatters, and Room 101 Magazine. He can also be found listening to podcasts, researching topics he has little use for, or running after a city bus.
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ciffciff 2014Haluk BilginerWinter Sleep
 

CIFF 2014: Timbuktu Review

by Taylor Sinople on October 13, 2014
A family of cattle herders living outside a West African city strives to maintain their quality of life amidst the presence of jihadists imposing their laws on the people of Timbuktu. Director Abderrahmane Sissako (“Bamako”) examines an especially relevant world issue here with admirable humanity. Extremists are exposed as manipulators and intimidators, but Sissako stops […]
 

CIFF 2014: The Midnight After Review

by Taylor Sinople on October 13, 2014
A busload of strangers seemingly become the last humans on Earth after an unexplained apocalyptic event erases all signs of human life in this midnight movie blowout from Hong Kong cult director Fruit Chan. As the group of survivors explore the city and propose theories on what happened, they begin to realize that without laws […]
 
The Circle

CIFF 2014: The Circle Review

by Taylor Sinople on October 13, 2014
Paragraph 175 may have criminalized homosexuality in post-war Germany, but that didn’t stop many gay men from jumping the border to Zurich, Switzerland. There, with the right contacts, one could join Der Kreis (The Circle): an underground magazine that published essays and illustrations for gay men and hosted secret parties. Of the 2,000 subscribers to […]
 

CIFF 2014: Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

by Taylor Sinople on October 10, 2014
Viviane doesn’t love her husband any more; in fact she hates him. But until her husband is willing to grant her a divorce, she’ll be ordered by the Israeli court to remain, imprisoned, in her marriage. This emotionally involving chamber piece takes place entirely in the courtroom as Viviane (played by Ronit Elkabetz, who co-directs […]
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  • Greg
    October 14, 2014 at 12:34 pm

    I was fortunate enough to see this at the Atlantic Film Festival after being recommended it by Zack Miller. I didn’t know who Nuri Bilge Ceylan was (In fact I had to scroll up to remember what his name was even though I just read it), so going into it I was a bit hesitant to buy a ticket for Turkish drama as lengthy as Winter Sleep was. However, I am happy to say that Zack did not lead me astray and Winter Sleep might be the best movie I’ve seen this year.

    This review echos how I feel about the film exactly. This movie was beautiful, masterfully acted, and featured some of the most intense conversations I’ve seen since the opening sequence of Inglorious Basterds. It was a story about people who lived a lifestyle that was quite alien to me in a landscape that looked very harsh and unforgiving, but at so many points I found myself wanting to stand up and applaud the words of Mr. Adin as they resonated with me so strongly (sometimes in ways that were admittedly embarrassing). It truly is a gorgeous, profoundly human film. Hopefully the Palme d’Or win will give it the attention it deserves.

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