Uzak

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.

Distant is the story of two alienated people and their intercrossed lives that end up illustrating something about the fate of mankind in a downsizing world. The basic premise is that of a country bumpkin, Yusuf, with whose arrival at his cousin Mahmut's house begins a dance of discomfiture between the two men who have become distanced from their inner selves each in a separate way. Yusuf's removal from his feeding grounds is not enough to cast a pall over his mood, but his naïve, insecure optimism is quick to turn him into a permanent cripple in the frigid atmosphere of Istanbul when it is denied all nourishment from Mahmut whose sophistication is a casebook recipe for alienation. Mahmut is a photographer who has labored hard to make it in the big city and by Yusuf's arrival completely turned himself over to his profession.

The women in Mahmut's life are transits, too, in one way or another: his ex-wife, now married again, has come to terms with the fact that she was left infertile by an abortion, which still vexes Mahmut's conscience, and now she and her new husband have decided to move to a new country, possibly never to return. His mother is ill and dying, but Mahmut puts off going to see her in the hospital until three quarters into the movie when a surgery has left her wailing with pain and bemoaning her fate like almost every other character in this picture. The motif of ailing mothers is one of the crucial ties between the cousins, for Yusuf has one too. In contrast to Mahmut's neglectful attitude, the very first thing Yusuf does in Istanbul is to call his own mother. Nonetheless, neither man may hope to effect much change in the women from whom they are separated by physical or emotional distance. Not only can they relate to the relationships in their lives, but also neither man can form a new relationship throughout the movie, with Yusuf experiencing repeated rejections from one employer after another and both men never mustering the courage to formalize a relationship with the attractive women who pass through their lives. Both transits, the cousins find that their lives are peopled by the relationships of most transitory kind.

Like a symphony, the film plays around with the various meanings of its title in a virtuoso directorial performance by NB Ceylan, who has made a career out of enshrining Tarkovsky into the landscape of Turkish cinema. The influence of Tarkovsky here is felt not only in Mahmut's private screenings of Solaris, and the movie's decidedly meticulous cinematography, but also in the mysterious deployment of free indirect imagery (imagery of a character's thoughts), and a mystical signpost at the end of the movie that recalls Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Interestingly, Distant won three Palme D'Ors at the Cannes film festival, where it was judged by no other than Steven Soderberg who has remade Solaris, that seminal masterpiece of Tarkovsky.

Unlike Tarkovsky and even Soderberg, however, Ceylan ends his film at a note that is nonetheless captivating for having been obvious for a very long time. The cousins drive each other to the brink and finally, disillusioned, Yusuf moves out and disappears from Mahmut's life. The story unfolds like a classic parable with readily identifiable and human elements that offset its "alien" features, such as its Turkish setting, and makes this film a universal and poignant tale of lives held at a devastating distance.

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!

Reading some of the other reviews of this film, i was reminded of both good and not so good aspects of it. But overall, i have to say it is one of the better films i have seen from any number of genres or countries recently. More than anything else, it avoided many of the typical traps of more recent international cinema, like taking nice pictures of landscapes or being 'hip', 'fun' or imitating American films like pulp fiction. The film is unique in many ways. For one thing, it is a film about relationships in which sex plays no role (unusual, especially for foreign films). It is also a film about two men's relationship to each other (also unusual - not a 'buddy film', no homosexual tension, no ego/phallic competition). It uses little dialogue, but communicates a tremendous amount. It is a simple story, yet full of complex details which are easily understood by any human being and universal in their relevance. I did not find the film dark or depressing (everything would seem this way if you watch Hollywood happy ending films all the time), but rather a true reflection of human emotions. For instance, in the scene where Mahmut realizes his cousin is gone is you see both his feeling of relief, that the cousin is gone and yet regret, that he pushed him away. Who has not felt such ambivalence - when losing a friend or lover, or in some other situation? It's rare to get these kinds of real human emotions displayed on film in a non-cliché way. As far as culture is concerned, or this being a Turkish film, i feel it strikes the very difficult balance between being a 'Turkish' film - about realities which more apply to that place (the greater struggle to make it in a Turkish city versus a European one; the greater contrast between country and city), and a universal, human story which didn't necessarily have to be set in Turkey. In this day and age where people around the world are consuming culture and fetishizing it, this film does not try to entice us as 'Turkish', nor does it try to communicate it as a 'harsh reality', or 'that's how Turkey/Istanbul IS'. And yet the cultural elements are there. I think the comparison to 'lost in translation' that somebody made is quite good. Everyone, at least in the US, was raving about that film. I personally thought it was mediocre at best. It was well put by someone as a vague story which supposedly was supposed to deal with 'disorientation' that happens to people living or traveling overseas. Even if the film was supposed to be humorous, the characters and their motivations or crises were never clear (even for a 'lighter' film or comedy, this is necessary). And i found myself being treated to a typically 'orientalist' story of the alienated Amerian overseas. Going back to 'Distant', as for the idea that this is bad acting, or too slow, or has no plot, I'm sorry but people who say this know nothing about film making and maybe nothing about being human, no offense. You do not have to be a film aficionado or cultural connoisseur to appreciate this film. This film will be two hours of your time well spent!

Hysterically painful; perhaps the kind of movie Chekhov would have made had he made movies. What's really funny is that the two cousins have so very much in common (many descriptions of their relationship on this site are dead wrong).

What's really funny and uncomfortable about these characters is that they just can't bring themselves to talk to each other - or anyone else! It's horrible. If you've ever been too shy, worried, self-involved, or just plain scared to talk to someone (and who hasn't?) you'll definitely see yourself in this film. And it won't be pretty.

It holds a mirror up to the audience and says, "If you don't like what you see... change it".