A Greek tragedy set in Turkey, Three Monkeys (2009, Nuri Bilge Ceylan) is so bleak it sometimes threatens to tip over into self-parody. Its central characters are doomed as soon as the narrative gears start turning, its pacing is extremely deliberate, and its color pallete favors grey skies and sepia skin tones. But Ceylan, a beloved world-cinema auteur who I'm just now starting to catch up with and who won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for this movie, is so in command aesthetically and narratively that he prevents Three Monkeys from becoming the standard-issue art-film downer it could've been in less confident hands.
What gets the story rolling on its emotionally downward trajectory is a hit-and-run accident that Servet (Ercan Kesal), a businessman with political ambitions, is determined to cover up. He convinces his chaffeur, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol), to take the rap for the crime and serve a year or so of jail time in exhange for a generous payoff that will benefit Eyup's financially ailing family. When Eyup's wife, Hacer (Hatice Aslan), asks Servet for an advance on the bribe that will benefit her and Eyup's aimless twentysomething son (Ahmet Rifat Sungar), she embarks on an affair with the politician. As you might expect, this doesn't lead to a happy ending.
Ceylan has a striking, painterly eye, but what's most impressive is how he's able to simultaneously move things forward at a very slow crawl and maintain a level of simmering tension that threatens to rise to boiling level at any time. This is particularly true after Eyup is released from prison, and the viewer knows he's bound to find about his wife's indiscretion at some point. Ceylan cleverly plays with that expectation, toying with the audience, but the sad, expressive performances he gets from Bingol and Aslan as husband and wife distinguish him as more than just a visually accomplished sadist.
I'm curious to see if Ceylan's other celebrated films, including Distant and Climates (for Coen Brothers fans, the latter is the art film that Josh Brolin's cowpoke sees and approves of in Joel and Ethan Coen's short for Chacun Son Cinema--check it out on YouTube if you haven't yet), present a fuller emotional spectrum, which I don't mean as too much of a knock on Three Monkeys. Its filmmaking is too impressive to put any cinephile in too bad a mood. Grade: B
Note: It's refreshing to be entirely caught up on this blog. I should mention that my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 will appear in the 7/16 Viewing Journal, because, hey, it's bound to get more hits than my review of a fatalistic Turkish drama, right?
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