Winter Sleep

There are films that try to evoke a world and its characters, and then there are those that seem to jettison us into an alternate dimension whose people and places have been existing for years—we’ve just finally been granted access. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep is one of the latter. With a knotty, multilayered storyline revealed in subtle increments, a feverish devotion to plumbing its characters’ psyches, and (it bears mentioning) its 196-minute running time, Winter Sleep finds its Turkish director at the peak of his powers, aesthetically and philosophically. Like much of Ceylan’s work, Winter Sleep intimately plumbs its characters and their relationships, yet strives to expose them only through suggestion and obfuscation. At the same time, there are elements in Winter Sleep that seem like striking departures from Ceylan’s style—most notably its reliance on precisely scripted dialogue, often conveyed through marathon conversations that help explain the film’s hefty yet transfixing length.

While Ceylan’s astounding Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) was inspired by Dostoevsky, Winter Sleep—co-written by Ceylan and his wife/collaborator, Ebru Ceylan—pays tribute to Anton Chekhov, whose ruminative dialogue, moral ambiguity, and plots structured more by mood than by narrative are especially utilized here. The film’s strategy is to plunk the audience down in the middle of a tangled web of emotional turmoil and simply let the conflicts run their agonizing course. Its subject is a wealthy landowning family in Turkey’s central mountainous area of Cappadocia, whose yellow-spackled crags bring to mind the bleakly beautiful landscapes of Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). Ceylan, though, seems equally interested in exploring the peaks and valleys of his leading man’s rugged facial features; Haluk Bilginer has the kind of hypnotic appearance that Bresson or Bergman might have lingered on in close-up for minutes on end. He plays Mr. Aydin, a former actor and heir to an upper-middle-class family who owns a hotel and several decrepit houses in the region. 

Aydin is a case study in crafting a heavily flawed, sometimes insufferable character that remains empathetic nonetheless. Arrogant yet insecure, spiteful, domineering, he’s the kind of armchair philosopher who writes condescending op-ed columns for the local newspaper, decrying religious, social, and political situations about which he knows nothing. More despicable is Aydin’s casual exploitation of the less fortunate people around him; he forces his assistant Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan) to carry his bags and literally fight his battles for him, and sends creditors to repossess the television and refrigerator of a poor family who haven’t paid their rent in months. This inspires the family’s young son, Ilyas, to hurl a rock at Aydin’s truck window, an act of pent-up rage that sets the film in motion. Aydin’s smug self-absorption is clearly displayed when Ilyas is marched up to Aydin’s manor by the boy’s uncle Hamdi (Serhat Mustafa Kiliç), the local imam, who pressures Ilyas to kiss Aydin’s hand as an act of apology. Though initially making a show of indifference, Aydin obviously enjoys extending his hand out to the traumatized Ilyas, relishing the opportunity to embrace whatever power he holds in the community.

Aydin’s wife and sister are all too eager to inform him of his pettiness. His sister Necla (Demet Akbag) has recently moved to Cappadocia from Istanbul after divorcing her husband; though civil on the surface, she quietly resents the superiority exuded by both Aydin and his wife, ultimately unleashing her disdain for Aydin in a brutally honest discussion about his failures as a writer. Aydin’s young, beautiful wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen) feels understandably constricted by the desolate setting and Aydin’s despotic micromanaging of her life; her job as a fundraiser for impoverished communities inspires her amid her depression, but even this sole pleasure is tainted by Aydin’s snide remarks about charity and his claims that Nihal doesn’t have the experience to run a non-profit. These characters are all unfulfilled and resentful in some way, and their strained attempts to remain harmonious buckle easily beneath the venomous words they sling at each other. Their conflicts might have been unbearably morose and insular if the characters didn’t take on such flesh-and-blood complexity.

These dramas are often conveyed by extremely long stretches of dialogue—two centerpiece conversations in particular, confrontations between Aydin and the aforementioned women, take up at least forty minutes near the middle of the film. The dialogue-heavy approach is certainly Chekhovian, but it’s a marked departure from the quiet ambiguity of Distant (2002) or the evocative, metaphoric imagery of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Yet this is one of the few cases in which a preponderance of dialogue makes the film more cinematic rather than less so; Ceylan stages, shoots, and edits these interactions with meticulous precision, with every relatively rare cut to a different camera angle stemming from a clear shift in the conversation and its emotional undercurrents. Some have criticized the verbose screenplay, claiming real people don't speak in longwinded debates about morality and society, but the language isn’t necessarily supposed to be realistic; Ceylan wields dialogue as yet another tool in his filmmaker’s arsenal, intensifying it in a manner that’s not only Chekhovian but also expressive in the manner of Don DeLillo, fleshing out the characters’ philosophies with a clarity and denseness that’s exhilarating to observe. Yes, the dialogue is long and wordy, but it’s also rich and fascinating; if we don’t criticize the thought-provoking language of a Proust novel, for example, why should it be off-limits to an artist as ambitious as Ceylan? 

In any case, these long interactions are necessary to humanize characters that otherwise might seem abstract and pedantic. A painful argument between Aydin and Nihal at a fundraising party carries the devastating, muffled anger of a real domestic dispute; Aydin’s jealousy and Nihal’s resentment are all too relatable. Later, a spiteful argument between Aydin and a local teacher, the words twisted by endless consumption of alcohol, meanders wildly but also evokes the class disparity between Aydin and the villagers, who live in the shadow cast by his family’s estate.

​The dialogue isn’t only meant to be further the plot and develop characters; early on, Necla delivers a theory of moral philosophy that serves as one of Winter Sleep’s most provocative themes. She posits that “not resisting evil” is one of the surest ways to ultimately prevent violence and criminality, allowing a thief to rob or a killer to kill and forcing the culprit to wallow in their own guilt. This dialogue works on a dramatic level—the way Aydin haughtily laughs at her idea perfectly evokes his character—but it also introduces a philosophy that complicates many of the film's later tensions in a compelling way. (At one point, Nihal tearfully employs this theory when Aydin threatens to take over her charity’s bookkeeping—only to realize that Necla’s hypothesis is not as effective in practice.) What’s more, Aydin's habit of using words to intimidate others and reassure himself—backing up his acerbic opinions not with sound reasoning, but with circuitous language and hollow intellectualism—suggests a critique not only of pompous rhetoric but of the underhanded ways in which those in power subjugate those beneath them, with their wealth and social standing convincing them that they’re always in the right. Ceylan uses dialogue not only to build characters and interrogate their relationships, but also to develop subtle political analogies and construct a philosophical bedrock on which these scenes are played out. This being the case, how could Winter Sleep not use language in such a precise, razor-sharp way?

Ceylan has long been one of the most “cinematic” directors working today, which usually means an emphasis on visual composition over dialogue; think of the gorgeous moment in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia when a barrel of apples rolling down a hill is meant to represent the cause-and-effect patterns that define human existence, how one seemingly small decision can have far-reaching consequences. With Winter Sleep, however, Ceylan adopts an approach at once theatrical and literary, experimenting with how language can be composed and presented onscreen. Many of the interactions are conveyed with a minimum of cutting, bringing the style closer to live theatre; but sudden dynamic leaps and contradictions remind us that we’re in the world of film. One long dialogue scene ends with a boy fainting, followed by a disorienting jump cut to a pack of horses crossing a river; elsewhere, a quiet, gray scene at dusk slams suddenly into bright sunlight, accompanied by the sound of a dog barking. Ceylan still plays with variation and visual space in a musical way, but he also seems to enjoy experimenting this time with a dialogue-driven aesthetic.

This exploration of various art forms culminates with an unexpected, highly literary voiceover narration near the end of the film, supplied by Aydin as he gazes at Nihal through an icy window. His narration is sincere and repentant, the words he wants to tell his wife and knows that he should; but they remain forever unspoken to her, and when he does begin typing away at his laptop soon after, it’s not a letter to Nihal that he’s writing but the beginning of a proposed tome on the history of Turkish theatre. It’s in ways like this that the film generates sympathy for Aydin, regardless of how arrogant and obnoxious he can be; the man he wants to be in his literary imagination is infinitely far from the man he actually is. It's this self-perceived inferiority, never expressed outwardly, that leads to his egotism and spitefulness; he can write himself as an ideal man in the articles and essays he peddles, but then there will always be the gap between his art and reality to haunt him.

There’s much more to Winter Sleep: more philosophy, more social allegory, more emotional catharsis, and (as always with Ceylan) a handful of images that are breathtakingly beautiful. But it’s senseless to exhaust all of them here, especially since I can't fully convey them anyway. There’s no getting around the fact that a 196-minute running time might intimidate some audiences, and that the long conversations and introspective character development might not satisfy viewers who crave action and strong storytelling from their movies. But over Winter Sleep’s three-plus hours, Ceylan reminds us how many other ways cinema can be satisfying, rich, and even entertaining. By the end, as with most great movies, you feel you’ve been spying through a keyhole into a parallel dimension, with hyperintense characters so complex and lived-in that you can practically feel their discontent drift through the winter air.

Originally published by Joyless Creatures (January 16, 2015).

Winter Sleep

Grade: A–

Runtime: 196m.
Countries: Turkey/France/ Germany
Premiere: May 16, 2014 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Release: December 19, 2014

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Producers: Zeynep Ozbatur Atakan, Muzaffer Yildirim
Writers: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Anton Chekhov (inspired by stories by)
Cinematography: Gökhan Tiryaki
Editors: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Bora Göksingöl

Cast: Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sözen, Demet Akbag, Ayberk Pekcan, Serhat Kiliç, Nejat Isler, Tamer Levent, Nadir Sarabacak, Mehmet Ali Nuroglu, Emirhan Doruktutan, Ekrem Ilhan, Rabia Özel, Fatma Deniz Yildiz