Turkey is one of the countries that fascinates me the most. This huge country torn between Europe and Asia, where the struggle between Western and traditional values seems to last forever, which many have tried to understand and describe, and perhaps the best insight into the life of modern Turkey, along with the great writer Orhan Pamuk, is provided by their best filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. We can travel around Turkey as much as we want and admire the ancient wonders of this fascinating culture, but with Pamuk’s books and Ceylan’s films, we will understand the country better than traveling there for a month.
“Kis Uykusu” or “Winter Dream” is probably Ceylan’s best known and best film, which won him the Palme d’Or in Cannes and nominations for the European Film of the Year in the category of best film, direction and screenplay. Ceylan found inspiration for this meditative, observational drama in Chekhov’s short story “The Woman” as well as “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoyevsky. Although it lasts more than three hours, “Winter Sleep” is an incredibly deep, smart and thoughtful film, and Ceylan shows these social, economic, but also intellectual differences between the inhabitants of his country in a fantastic way. As usual, he placed the action in Cappadocia, a historical region located in central Anatolia, that is, Asia Minor, an area that has been the cradle of various civilizations since prehistoric times.
Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) was once an actor in Istanbul, and now he owns a hotel located in the mountains of Cappadocia as well as numerous properties in the place that he rents out to the local population. And he is a representative of the Turkish intelligentsia, the elite, a rich man, a secularist who likes to consider himself a good and honest man, an altruist with a sense of social injustice, but in fact he is a cynical guy who despises traditional Turkish society. He looks down on those people who live around him, and doesn’t try to understand their problems, but nevertheless he regularly writes columns for the local newspaper in which he rants about the problems there that don’t really concern him.
Aydin’s pretentiousness is also highlighted by the fact that he set himself the task of writing a book or rather an encyclopedia on the history of Turkish theater, and as time passes, his egoism and vanity will slowly begin to be exposed. He will be the first to point this out to his sister Necla, who lives with him after her divorce and who knows very well that her brother is an incredibly conceited and vain guy who, in fact, from the comfort of his armchair in his columns writes superficial and sentimental criticisms about something he has nothing to do with. connections. The trigger for this will be a meeting with a young and poor imam, whose family is a tenant in one of Aydin’s houses and due to other problems they were late in paying the rent, which is why they received a foreclosure, which Aydin admittedly did not even know about, because he deals with these small things and he doesn’t get tired.
In addition to his sister, Aydin will also confront his young wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen), who also does practically nothing in that seemingly idyllic environment, and soothes her remorse with humanitarian work, and it is obvious that there is no more love between her and Aydin. With several other people, Nihal collects aid for the victims of the recent earthquake, tries to build a school, and Aydin does not show too much interest in her activities. But when Nihal organizes a fundraiser at their home, he gets angry because she didn’t ask his permission and tells her that it will turn into a disaster because of her inexperience and that someone from the rest of the team will steal the money.
Aydin’s contempt for people and his cynicism can also be seen in this, and it is a film in which Ceylan perfectly explored the psychology of the characters, almost in the footsteps of Bergman, and it is almost an unsurpassed character study. The dialogues between the characters are masterful, clever, Belginer is outstanding as Aydin, that haughty guy whose exterior and gallantry can easily fool many at first, but everyone who knows him, just as the viewer will get to know him by the end, is aware of what he is like man. It’s a great movie also because Ceylan makes perfect use of the landscape and setting, that fascinating rural Cappadocia, rock houses and all.