David O'ConnellThree Monkeys
December 1st 2009 05:25
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film opens on a lonely country road in the dead of a summer’s night outside a small Turkish town. A car glides through the narrow strand of trees, the ghostly luminescence of its headlights slowly retreating to a pinprick in the distance. Something horrible has happened: in the next shot we see the car’s driver scrambling away from a fallen body in the middle of the road as a second vehicle materialises through the dense black shadows.
It turns out the driver is a local politician, Servat (Ercan Kesal); in the midst of an election campaign the last thing he needs is adverse publicity and so he asks the ultimate sacrifice of his personal driver Eyup (Yavuz Bingol): assume my crime as your own, and your wife, Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) will be compensated with your wage and a lump sum upon release from prison. Eyup accepts without blinking an eye; it’s a strange definition of sacrifice they adhere to in these parts.
For the duration of the nine month sentence, focus switches to a distracted Naceri, who unwittingly draws the attentions of a curious Servat, and the troubled Ismail who remains idle over summer whilst hanging out with a tough crowd.
Stripped down to its basic components, you could say not a lot happens in Three Monkeys but the weighty inferences of its silences, the lingering, wordless gazes of its protagonists, make this a mesmerising experience. Ceylan’s film is a real mood piece which resonates with a stark, potent visual beauty and morally ambiguous core. At various times, all four main characters seem to be the film’s central point of focus; it’s a balancing act that works to perfection.
There’s a painterly quality to Ceylan’s reduction of these seemingly drab environments; his cinematographer, Gokhan Tiryaki, must have been an expressionist painter in a past life. Nearly every shot of the film holds your attention for the sheer poetry of its imagery.
The actors are all first-rate contributors; their faces convey anger, frustration, desolation and claustrophobic despair with slight inflections rather than exaggerated gestures. In refining his film, Ceylan hasn’t neglected his performers at all, which is remarkable considering the detail he’s poured into establishing the architecture of the world around them, and yet using little in the way of camera movement and no score at all.
With subtlety he allows ominous motifs to linger with ambiguous meaning: the rustle of wind through open windows; the rattle of a knife on a draining board; a constantly chirping mobile phone with a ringtone that hints at an underlying meaning slowly resolving itself in the narrative; the suggestion of a supernatural intrusion through the appearances of a dead son in moments of stress for two main characters.
The pacing of Three Monkeys is calculated, allowing small moments to linger, to inflate with a heavy portentousness; nothing is clear-cut in a film marked by the impression of detached voyeurism it evokes. It’s just beneath the surface that Ceylan works his magic, teasing out these tales through a subliminal, magnetic force in sequences that linger just long enough to create tension and fascination without tipping over into self-indulgence.
Trying to relay the essence of Three Monkeys to a friend wouldn’t be doing it justice. This is a film that needs to be seen and absorbed; it’s on the surface that your eye will be immediately drawn to bathe in its aesthetic beauty, but it's between the lines that its complexities lie.
It turns out the driver is a local politician, Servat (Ercan Kesal); in the midst of an election campaign the last thing he needs is adverse publicity and so he asks the ultimate sacrifice of his personal driver Eyup (Yavuz Bingol): assume my crime as your own, and your wife, Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) will be compensated with your wage and a lump sum upon release from prison. Eyup accepts without blinking an eye; it’s a strange definition of sacrifice they adhere to in these parts.
For the duration of the nine month sentence, focus switches to a distracted Naceri, who unwittingly draws the attentions of a curious Servat, and the troubled Ismail who remains idle over summer whilst hanging out with a tough crowd.
Stripped down to its basic components, you could say not a lot happens in Three Monkeys but the weighty inferences of its silences, the lingering, wordless gazes of its protagonists, make this a mesmerising experience. Ceylan’s film is a real mood piece which resonates with a stark, potent visual beauty and morally ambiguous core. At various times, all four main characters seem to be the film’s central point of focus; it’s a balancing act that works to perfection.
Hacer (Hatice Aslan) with husband Eyup (Yavuz Bingol)
There’s a painterly quality to Ceylan’s reduction of these seemingly drab environments; his cinematographer, Gokhan Tiryaki, must have been an expressionist painter in a past life. Nearly every shot of the film holds your attention for the sheer poetry of its imagery.
The actors are all first-rate contributors; their faces convey anger, frustration, desolation and claustrophobic despair with slight inflections rather than exaggerated gestures. In refining his film, Ceylan hasn’t neglected his performers at all, which is remarkable considering the detail he’s poured into establishing the architecture of the world around them, and yet using little in the way of camera movement and no score at all.
With subtlety he allows ominous motifs to linger with ambiguous meaning: the rustle of wind through open windows; the rattle of a knife on a draining board; a constantly chirping mobile phone with a ringtone that hints at an underlying meaning slowly resolving itself in the narrative; the suggestion of a supernatural intrusion through the appearances of a dead son in moments of stress for two main characters.
The pacing of Three Monkeys is calculated, allowing small moments to linger, to inflate with a heavy portentousness; nothing is clear-cut in a film marked by the impression of detached voyeurism it evokes. It’s just beneath the surface that Ceylan works his magic, teasing out these tales through a subliminal, magnetic force in sequences that linger just long enough to create tension and fascination without tipping over into self-indulgence.
Trying to relay the essence of Three Monkeys to a friend wouldn’t be doing it justice. This is a film that needs to be seen and absorbed; it’s on the surface that your eye will be immediately drawn to bathe in its aesthetic beauty, but it's between the lines that its complexities lie.
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Comment by Matt Shea
20/20 Filmsight
Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic
Comment by Mountain Fog
I absolutely adored the opening paragraph of your review!
You indeed have a poetic feel, and embue your review with the atmosphere of the film itself.
Let a great grasp of the English language be the staff of all life, I say!
By the way, is this on anywhere? Or is it in DVD store release?
cheers
fog
Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic