Uzak

Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir) is a successful photographer living in his middle-class apartment in Istanbul. His wife has recently left him, and he is suffering from feelings of isolation and loneliness. Mahmut's cousin Yusuf (Emin Toprak) loses his factory job (along with possibly 1000 others in his hometown) and travels to Istanbul to find work on the ships, where he hears the money is plentiful and easy. Yusuf moves in with Mahmut, and the social and emotional distance between the two is immediately apparent. As time goes by, Yusuf struggles to find work and desperately searches for love (or sex) to no avail, while Mahmut becomes increasingly frustrated with Yusuf's slobbish attitudes and lethargic attitude.

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's background is in photography, leading to a natural progression into films. His eye for photographic beauty is evident as Uzak is often astonishing in it's framing and colour saturation. Istanbul is shot with an aura of misery, and these two lonely souls gaze out to the grey sea with the rain and drizzle falling upon their slumped shoulders. However, amongst the greys and the browns, Uzak proves to be an extremely funny film, with Ceylan drawing humour from the most mundane of everyday occurrences. I found the most subtly funny scene is where Mahmut and Yusuf watch Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), with Yusuf getting bored at what looks like around the twenty minute point. Yusuf leaves, and Mahmut quickly puts a porn video in. Yusuf re- enters causing Mahmut to quickly turn the channel over, only for Yusuf to linger over his shoulder mindlessly staring at the TV. It brilliantly captures the increasing tension between the two, while laughing at their ridiculous situation.

The title Uzak translates at Distant, referring to the social, emotional and spiritual distance between the two, but it also refers to the global distance that is appearing in society as the world gets smaller. Communication is easier yet harder. Although Mahmut and Yusuf are physically and geographically together, they are miles apart. Mahmut is sophisticated and clean (or at least he likes to think of himself like this and models himself on Tarkovsky, but as the aforementioned scene proves, he'd much rather watch a bit of porn) and Yusuf is uneducated and messy. Mahmut has sacrificed personal happiness to live out his idyllic middle-class lifestyle, and Yusuf lazes around expecting a job and money to come to him, leading him to live out his miserable, sexually inactive life. Uzak is occasionally grim and contains little dialogue, but Ceylan's amazing eye for humour and social commentary make it a wonderful experience. And special mention must go to the two leads, who are brilliant in their roles, making it all the more tragic that Emin Toprak was killed shortly after the filming was complete.

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It's probably a year since I saw Uzak, but it has left strong memories of the two main characters, jaded photographer Mahmut and his naive cousin from the village Yusuf.

It's a long film with very little dialogue and a quite limited plot. This has evidently annoyed a fair few viewers. But the film constructs such a painfully believable portrait of Mahmut and Yusuf that there's just as much emotional tension as in the paciest thriller.

Just to be clear, there's no padding in this film -- in the long pauses where no one speaks there as much happening in the characters' emotions (and in yours, watching them) as you could bear. Go to see it awake and alert, and you'll be gripped rather than anaesthetised.

Uzak rings true in so many ways, and that sincerity is probably its greatest accomplishment. People don't grapple with events and problems, so much as with each other. In fact, in the whole film, there's probably not one point where the main characters (Mahmut, Yusuf and Mahmut's ex-wife Nazan) are not opposed.

Much of it is true the world over: country cousin Yusuf's perhaps wilfully naive expectation that a job on a ship will drop into his lap; Mahmut's urbanised cynicism and unwillingness to sympathise with Yusuf.

Other truths are more-specific to Turkey: Yusuf's incomprehension that Mahmut might be tolerating his stay with gritted teeth; Yusuf veering between macho ambition and wide-eyed awkwardness when he tries to get to know a woman.

Uzak is undoubtedly a pretty bleak film, and one Ceylan's strengths is not to beat us over the head with the themes he explores. For me at least, I believed entirely in the behaviour of his characters. All the little failed attempts to connect and petty cruelties ring so true. And yet I didn't leave with a message that "The world is like that", but instead I got "This is how we sometimes treat each other."

I am very thankful that the small college town of Abingdon, Va.- near Bristol, TN. and home of the famous Barter Theatre where Gregory Peck once acted- managed to get an art film festival togather and show this film there. Abingdon is two and a hour hours from where I live, but the trip was worth it in every sense of the word. UZAK/DISTANT is an amazing, brilliant, jarring, emotional, captivating film. As a Turkish-American, this film was not only a testimony as to what life in Turkey is like; but on a larger scale it tells the world of what it is like to be Turkish whether one lives in Istanbul, Berlin, Montreal, New York, or Omaha. It may be two hours in length as opposed to five minutes, but this is effectively our Bob Marley song. There are so many wonderful scenes in this film. It is very difficult to choose just a random few. But, for me, one telling scene takes place in a Beyoglu (downtown Istanbul) cinema. The title character, played by Mehmet Emin Toprak who sadly died in a car accident shortly after this film's completion, follows a very attractive young woman down a staircase to the cinema's main auditorium. She goes into see "Vanilla Sky." As the image of Tom Cruise is reflected from a glass, we sense that Turkish men are competing with Tom Cruise for their own women's affections even though Tom Cruise is nowhere to found in Beyoglu. The scenes shot across the Bosphorous shores are also quite revealing as they symbolize the beauty, yet desperate empty gulfs, which are a painful fact of life in Turkey. In this film, the gulf separates lovers and families. A simple, empty packet of Samsun (Turkish brand) cigarettes and a dying mouse jump off the screen the way seagulls did in the 1982 Serif Goren-Yilmaz Guney film "Yol." Many of Guney's films, including "Yol," "Suru- the Herd" (1978- completed by Zeki Okten) and "Baba-The Father" (1971) have been considered by many to be the best Turkish films ever made. Without Guney's sometimes overblown social-political anger (especially in his last film, the 1983 prison drama "Duvar-The Wall"), "Distance" captures the essence of Turkish life quite remarkably. This is a crowning achievement for a director who in my view can already be proclaimed as the Turkish equivalent to directors like Tarkovsky, Bresson, and Ozu. I can't wait to see his other films!

It has taken me about a year now after seeing this film to write about it. Lord knows I have wanted to, after witnessing it I knew I saw something I hadn't seen before but wasn't sure why. Now after reflecting for quite some time I know, it's these characters that even now I still can't stop thinking about.

Distant briefly and slowly tells the story of a relative (Yusuf) who comes from the rurals to live briefly with a well off to do photographer (Mahmut) in the city in hopes to find employment. However it becomes clear that after Yusuf hypothesizes the idea of being a sailor and his employment prospects dim, that he's really searching for something else, some sort of purpose in his life.

Through all this soul searching we are taken through seasonal surroundings that are filmed exquisitely. The context in which they happen makes the scenes more powerful in 2 particular ones when a girl Yusuf has been following suddenly meets up with her significant other, and the look of Yusuf's face as he looks into a basket of fish and the shot and light that reflects off his tortured face. That scene in itself has to be one of the most gorgeously filmed pieces I have witness in I don't know how long.

In the end Mahmut has his own demons too, but ends up confronting his relative that he is not really trying to find a job and is forced to ask him to leave, in a scene that is very simple but has the feeling of true heartbreak.

What the viewer is left with is lots of reflecting and pondering for these 2 people who everyone can see a piece of themselves in. You should not be put off by the pace of this film it is truly worth every single breathtaking second.

Rating 10 out of 10.

"Uzak" was Nuri Bilge Ceylan's third film but it was the one that established him internationally and marked him out as a world class director. It's an astonishingly mature and imaginative picture displaying great visual acuity as well as a deep understanding of human nature. It's about two cousins, Mahmut, a photographer whose wife has left him and Yusuf, who has come to stay with him while looking for a job. At first their relationship is cordial and friendly but gradually Yusuf begins to get on Mahmut's nerves. Ceylan tells his tale with great empathy and a good degree of humour, despite the sadness at the centre and draws wonderful performances from Muzaffer Ozdemir as Mahmut and Emin Toprak as Yusuf. Tragically, Toprak was killed in a car accident just after the film was completed and posthumously shared the best actor prize at Cannes with his co-star. Absolutely essential viewing.