Winter Sleep ***** (2014, Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sözen, Demet Akbag) – Movie Review

Winter Sleep arrives in Britain big credentials. It is the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014 and the official submission of Turkey to the best foreign language film category of the 87th Academy Awards 2015. It has the influence of Anton Chekhov and Ingmar Bergman hovering all about it, indeed two of Chekov’s short stories, ‘The Wife’ and ‘Excellent People’, are accessed.

That the shadows of these greats hang over it doesn’t hurt Winter Sleep at all. It is its own thing and it’s a great one. It’s one of those movies where people just talk for hours, so the talk and the actors doing the talking better be good. And they are.

Haluk Bilginer stars as conceited and self-obsessed former actor Aydin, who runs a small tourist hotel in central Anatolia with his lovely, introverted, much younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen) and his sister Necla (Demet Akbag), who is suffering from loneliness and depression after her recent divorce. Husband and wife and brother and sister have difficult relationships that are growing worse. Everyone feels trapped and bored, and animosities easily flare up unpleasantly as the cast feel it’s necessary to tell each other the truth, which is always hurtful.

Aydin is also having troubles with tenants who can’t pay their rent. Their boy chucks a stone through his car window. The boy’s uncle comes to the hotel to apologise and make up for the damage. But this doesn’t help repair the damage of landlord-tenant dispute. More relationships are growing worse.

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan says he had more than 200 hours of material and his original cut was 4 hours 30 minutes. He then worked hard to cut it down to its present three hours and 15 minutes. Eventually after a couple of those hours, you finally realise the story’s really all about Aydin. Though, despite his intelligence and culture, he’s a controlly, self-justifying, up-himself idiot who never sees anything from the other person’s viewpoint, Bilginer somehow makes him understandable and then sympathetic.

Bilginer gives a wonderful performance, while Sözen and Akbag are perfect is their exquisitely honed performances. The two long scenes of combative dialogue they share with Bilginer are electrifying. The movie is beautifully handled by Ceylan, who shows just enough of the incredibly striking bleak Anatolian views to make his points without it ever looking picturesque or touristy. Everything about the film is subtle and suggested.  It’s astonishing the actors didn’t win awards at Cannes too.

Ceylan lingers as long as he feels he wants on any shot or sequence. It should feel it’s running at a snail’s pace, but the film rivets the attention and grips totally like it’s a thriller, and never gets boring, not even a little bit dull, in all its long running time which zips by like it’s an hour and a half of screen time.

It’s one of half a dozen or so of the greatest world cinema foreign movies of 2014, so expect awards.

This is the second Turkish film to win the Palme d’Or after Yol (1982).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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