Three Monkeys (Üç maymun) Nuri Bilge Ceylan Turkey 2008
Depressed looking people staring out across the straits of the Bosphorus can only mean one thing: a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
The film Three Monkeys marks the Turkish director's third use of aimless moping as a motif. The trick served him well in Distant, the work that brought him to international acclaim back in 2002, but now it lacks novelty. Ceylan makes up for this repetition with a thriller-like plot, beautiful cinematography and relentlessly varied pacing. This creates a film experience that may not be for everyone, but brings ample rewards in proportion to the amount of attention viewers devote to the screen.
The story forms around chauffeur Eyup, who helps his boss, Servet, by taking the blame for a hit-and-run car accident in exchange for a lump sum of cash. Whilst away in prison his wife Hacer begins an affair with the boss until her son Ismail discovers the infidelity. Upon Eyup’s release the customary shots of the Bosphorus begin as he senses that something isn't quite right at home, and then comes the fallout and recrimination.
As with his previous films Ceylan uses a stop-go pacing style to force audiences to focus more keenly on aspects other than the story. Mostly slow, the film takes an age to depict even the simplest events. Long and beautifully framed scenes of the characters walking to and from the apartment they live in by the railway tracks feast the eyes. In one spectacularly visual scene the son Ismail leaves home to visit his father at the prison. He walks across the road from the apartment block, shimmies over a fence and strolls across some train tracks as the shadows of clouds above trail along the ground. Repeatedly, dark clouds fill the top of camera shots setting the moody ambience.
Blink for a minute though in these laborious scenes and you run the risk of missing critical moments where the plot surges forward. But the demand for the audience’s constant attention constantly puts extra emphasis on the look of the film and how the characters feel.
On the downside, the style adds weight to charges of misogyny. Eyup aggressively pins his wife Hacer against the family bed after he returns from jail. His manhandling makes for uneasy watching even though we understand he’s reacting badly to the suspicion that she may have had an affair whilst he was away. In another disquieting scene from a Ceylan film, Climates, the lead character virtually forces an occasional girlfriend to have sex with him. Three Monkeys again walks a fine line between powerful drama and outright sexism.
The film also bolsters Ceylan’s claim to Istanbul. Film directors can make a city their own. Woody Allen distinctively gave New York his own neurosis and love of George Gershwin in his works of the 1970s and 1980s, notably in the film Manhattan. Istanbul has Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who loves to frame knotted brows against the sea front with billowy clouds wafting high above.
Three Monkeys continues the development of this major talent. By resorting to plot intrigue Ceylan carries forward his visual style, which might by itself just be repetitious. The results are once again never less than mesmerising. Depressed people in general and characters who fail to see, hear or talk about their predicament in specific, have never looked so good.
