Melodramatic Ends: <em>Winter Sleep</em> (<em>Kiş Uykusu</em>)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Melodramatic Ends: Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu) dir. by. Nuri Bilge Ceylan Susan Potter (bio) and Matias Perez (bio) Melodramatic Ends: Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu) Dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Scr. Ebru Ceylan and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 2014 This review arrives late to the red carpet, following the award in 2014 of the Palme d'Or, Cannes Festival's most coveted prize, to Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Winter Sleep. The accepted critical narrative is that the film is not Ceylan's best but that the recognition of his directorial talent was long overdue. Feted in the director's home country, the Turkish-French-German co-production had a wide national release and consequently generated the director's highest box office in his career to date. Reviewers across the period of festival releases were divided about the film's merits, some hailing it a masterpiece (Karin Badt, Film Criticism), while others experienced it as enervating literary exercise (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). For us, Winter Sleep, for all its stagey and durational faults, remains weirdly compelling, in part because of its seeming last-minute reliance on melodrama to conclude its two intertwined plotlines. It's not as if the Ceylans' films have not been identified with melodrama before. In the aftermath of another award, for Best Director at Cannes in 2008, Three Monkeys was described by critics as "distressingly empty melodrama" (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice) and, in a more negative evaluation of Ceylan's work, "failed melodrama" (Kent Jones, Film Comment). In some of the reviews of Winter Sleep, melodrama returns as a salient, if suppressed, genre. Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, calls the film tragicomedy, but his review has the key words of melodrama written all over it: pathos, domestic drama, soap opera, and swells and surges of emotion. Moreover, he faults the director for failing to realize the full potential of the film's most dramatic scene, finding it "overstated and misjudged." Even if other critics endeavor to rescue the Ceylans' films from melodrama by [End Page 86] pointing to the quality of direction and the understated performance of the actors, overstatement and misjudgment are qualities that melodrama might happily lay claim to. Indeed, the film's melodramatic register is key to its subtle but trenchant theme of social inequality. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Nihal (Melisa Sözen) appears unbidden outside the imam's family home. Screen capture from Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu). Winter Sleep's opening sequence introduces the protagonist Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a wealthy retired actor who has returned to his childhood province of Cappadocia to run a boutique hotel. His main income, however, comprises rents from local families who occupy properties that Aydin has inherited from his father. Aydin retreats from his role as landlord by employing Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan) and a series of unnamed and unseen lawyers to manage his tenancies, freeing him to write a weekly column for a local newspaper, Voice of the Steppes, and to research his long-anticipated book on the history of Turkish theatre. While Aydin endeavors to sustain his identity as an educated, artistic, and literary man by distancing himself from his own status as landlord and the cruelties inflicted by his agents, he is drawn into a conflict with the family of the local hodja or imam, Hamdi (Serhat Kiliç), as their eviction looms. It is the action of a child, Hamdi's nephew Ilyas (Emirhan Doruktutan), that propels Aydin into closer proximity to those people with whom he has a relationship based less on community than on property. Seeing Hidayet driving Aydin in his distinctive orange jeep through the village, Ilyas lies in wait further down the road and throws a stone to smash the passenger window where Aydin sits. We soon discover in a following scene that the stone's throw is retribution not only for the repossession of the family's fridge and television but also for the humiliating beating suffered by Ilyas's unemployed father, Ismail (Nejat Isler), at the hands of the police who were also present during the repossession. With his stone's throw, Ilyas catalyzes one of the film's plotlines, which involves Hamdi [End...