The Cut

The third part of Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin's trilogy 'Love, Death and the Devil' is a slow-winding powerful globe-trotting epic that follows Nazaret Manoogian (French actor Tahar Rahim)  an Armenian blacksmith on his journey to reunite with his family after war has torn them apart.  It starts in 1915 when the Turkish Army carry out a mass genocide of the Armenians and Manoogian has been drafted into war work and forced into building roads with a gang who are all end up being executed by a band of marauding bandits. He escapes because the ex-criminal assigned to kill him hasn't the heart to do the job so he just slits part of his throat which leaves him speechless, but alive. 

After surviving death Manoogian is eventually rescued by a sympathetic traveling soap manufacturer who sneaks him into the nearby town of Aleppo and gives him sanctuary from the mercenary Turkish Army. Then in 1918 when the British finally liberate the city and drive the Turks out, he discovers quite by chance that although his wife died in the war, his twin daughters survived and are still alive.  Thus starts his odyssey that will take him several years and right across to the other side of the world, a journey that is not helped by the fact that he is both destitute and mute.

When Manoogian eventually tracks down the orphanage where some Beduins had dropped the girls off, he discovers that one of the tutors had arranged marriages for both of them with Armenian businessmen. They however had already left to go to Cuba, and so Manoogian gets a passage as crew on a steamboat to follow them to the Tropics.  By now we are getting the message that despite all his arduous efforts to go to such extremes, he is always one step behind them as they are never there when he arrives at his next destination.

It's a heart wrenching saga that seems like Manoogian's troubles will never cease and it all appears so completely futile, partly because of his inability to speak so we can  totally understand how he really is coping with this.  He always looks so forlorn against the vast stunning but treacherous barren vistas that he must deal with from the Armenian deserts to the American Plains that add another compelling layer to this melodrama.

Although 'The Cut' lacks some of the punch of the much acclaimed and multi-award winning 'Head-On' and 'The Edge of Heaven', it is still a rather spectacular movie that shows that Akin is most definitely still at the top of his game. He's helped with a wonderful central performance from Rahim who expresses himself so beautifully with his face and gestures for us to share the depths of his struggle in his singular mission that never seems like it will ever end happily. 

★★★★★★★★

WINTER SLEEP

Turkish auteur filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest masterful epic is set in the steppes of Cappadocia on the desolate plains of Anatolia, which are heart-stoppingly beautiful. Some of the ancient caves carved into the side of this mountainous terrain have been converted into a Hotel by Aydin, a local landowner retired from acting. It's the middle of a rough winter so the only inhabitants are Aydin's much younger wife, and his sister, and a couple of guests.

The story starts when Aydin is being driven through the village by Hidayet his loyal second-in-command when a rock thrown by a local schoolboy shatters their jeep's window.  Hidayet stops and catches the boy and they drive him home to raise the matter with his father. The meeting doesn't go well, as it turns out that Ismail the boy's angry father has just been released from jail and his family are about to be evicted for not paying the rent.  Their Landlord just happens to be Aydin, who likes to keep a good distance between himself and his tenants, and the rest of the world too.

Back in the hotel he secretes himself away penning opinion pieces for a local newspaper and threatening to start a book on Turkish Theater which he never seems to get around too.  He is both selfish and arrogant and doesn't take too well to dissent or criticism so when his sister, who has just moved back home after a recent nasty divorce, starts to discuss some of his recent articles, it quickly turns into an unpleasant argument as he bitterly vents his anger on her.

Nihal his young wife lives in her own separate quarters and spends her time and his money helping the poor local community in anyway she can, but when Aydin discovers this he just butts and tries to bully her into stopping.  It's an unbalanced fight as her naivete is really no match for his cynicism and his determination to complete control everything and just use the power of his money to get his own way.

This is all quite a reversal of style for Ceylan from his last movie the mesmerising 'Once Upon a Time in Anatolia' which had scant dialogue, as he now drives this story up with several very lengthy set-pieces arguments. First with the two siblings, and now we witness the last tenuous strands holding this rather unbalanced marriage together, being shattered as Aydin and his wife battle it out verbally.

There are others in the saga that add some touches of humor into this otherwise bleak tale such as the local teacher who is quite a funny drunk when Aydin holes up at his friends remote Farm when he cannot escape to Istanbul as he threatens Nihal he will. Also the consequences of the decisions that they both make when they are apart are humorous on one level, but mainly wrenching especially when Nihal takes it upon herself to offer to rescue Ismail and his family.

It is not the visual treat of the exquisite rugged snow-covered landscape courtesy of cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki that makes this epic 196 minute movie so compelling but it does play a major factor in ensurung that this magnum opus is the unforgettable enthralling movie that it is.  On paper it seems like a rather thin scenario but in reality Ceylan fills both the screen and the story to the brim, and its clear to see why this time he finally captured the big prize at The Cannes Film Festival.

★★★★★★★★★★

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA

In the dead of night, a group of 10 men, including a police commissioner, his Arab driver, a prosecutor, a doctor, diggers and two self confessed killers drive through the desolate steppes of the Anatolian countryside, and the empty winding roads are only lit by the headlights of their convoy. They are searching for a corpse, the victim of a brutal murder. Kenan, the main killer claims he was drunk and cannot remember where he buried the body, and his poor idiot brother is no use at all.  Their only clue is a fountain, but the roadside is littered with them and they all look the same and so the search seems both endless and pointless.

As they drive from hillside to hillside there is plenty of downtime and whilst the prisoner remains silent and morose the odd band of officials incessantly banter and crack jokes, bicker over their next course of action, and discuss diverse topics ranging from food to their country’s future.  Their chat adds an unexpected level of humor to this unrelentingly grim tale.  As the movie very slow moves on their conversations get more personal and they tentatively relate details, albeit somewhat veiled, about their own stories, which reveal a great deal about their own troubled pasts.

As the long night draws on the team stop to eat at the nearby village and are welcomed and fed by the local mayor and his beautiful daughter who add another strand to the story.  Once they have dined Kenan not only admits to knowing the actual location of the body but also professes that he is actually the father of the victim’s son.  They find the body and as the Prosecutor dictates an on the spot Report on the grisly scene to his Assistant he suddenly bizarrely cracks a joke about the victim looking like Clark Gable.

They take the body back to a nearby provincial town where they met by an angry mob and the widow and her son. Now the pace picks up somewhat and things begin to happen, though all their meanings are really deliberately unclear.

This 170 min epic is the latest feature film by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan for which he won the Gran Prix at Cannes last year.  His style is very metaphysical and totally unrushed ….. my friend Peter who watched this with me , very acutely observed that if this plot had been made into a TV Show it would have been over in 20 minutes.  The visual look of the piece shot in dim light is stunning …. helped by the natural beauty of that region. But what totally fascinated me about this film was that Ceylan had this amazing knack of making the monotonous real human beings appear really interesting.

I walked out of the movie theater somewhat dazed, and my first question was ‘what just happened?’ and tried to start making some conventional sense of all the strands of the story.  But some hours later, possibly non the wiser,  and I still find myself unable to stop thinking about this unique film which is quite unlike any I have viewed for a very long time (ever even?) and I now appreciate that this was movie going at its best.


★★★★★★★★★