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Winter Sleep, review: 'fiendishly intelligent'

Robbie Collin relishes a bold, beautiful – and very long – film about a failing marriage Melisa Sözen in the Cannes 2014 Palme D'Or winner Winter Sleep By Robbie Collin

4:11PM GMT 20 Nov 2014


Dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Starring: Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sözen, Demet Akbag.

Cert: TBA. Running time: 196 minutes.

A beast, a beauty, a castle in the snow. Winter Sleep, the new film from the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has all the key components of a fairy tale, but its magic blows in whispering breaths, raising the hairs on your arms even as you barely notice the air’s movement.

This is a bold, intently serious film, and a justified winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Festival, in which we watch a failing marriage unravel in a mountaintop hotel on the Anatolian steppe. (Think The Shining as retold by Chekhov, without the axe and spooks.)

The proprietor is Mr Aydin (veteran Turkish stage actor and sometime EastEnders cast member Haluk Bilginer), a retired thesp who carries himself like the region’s kindly baron, or a Shakespearean king, and whose many business interests pervade the village down below.


He’s also researching a history of the Turkish theatre – “it will be a thick, serious book,” he advises a visitor – and, in the evenings, writes a pompous column for the local newspaper, Voice of the Steppe. “My kingdom might be small,” he rumbles happily, “but at least I’m king there.” Aydin’s much younger, very pretty wife, Nihal (Melisa Sözen), lives with him at the hotel, as does his divorced sister Necla (Demet Akbag), although the quiet season approaches, the tourists depart, and the snow-clouds gather overhead. With next-to-no guests to care for, Aydin, Nihal, Necla and a handful of their associates from the village are left with little to do, and the resentments that have spent the last few months tucked away at the backs of their heads begin to wake.

Early on, Aydin is driving to the village, where the houses nestle and burrow into the enormous rocky folds of the landscape. Then, with a low crack, a stone breaks one of the car windows. It was thrown by a boy who you assume is just a troublemaker, although Ceylan gradually reveals a motive behind this apparently unprompted attack. It turns out that most people have at least one very good reason to dislike Aydin: even his wife, whose charity fundraising efforts he dismisses laughingly, criticising the state of her bookkeeping like a teacher ticking off a particularly slow pupil.

Only one man, the obsequious imam, makes a concerted effort to get along with him, although Aydin is annoyed by his flattering talk and insincere, teeth-baring grins, and obliquely insults him in his newspaper column.

His sister is unimpressed. “It reads like the writer has adopted certain values just to make himself popular,” she says. “It stinks of sentimentality.”

“I wish my threshold of self-deception was as low as yours,” he snaps back. Over the film’s three hours and 16 minute running time, there’s a great deal of snapping and counter-snapping. Ceylan and his excellent cast the picture around conversations: long, literate, circuitous, psychologically searching, sometimes funny, almost always passive-aggressive. These unfold and refold in fire-lit rooms, covering everything from mushroom-picking to the nature of evil and guilt, each one casting another shaft of light on Aydin’s monumental, fragile ego.

In practical terms, this makes for a lot of scanning subtitles, although the closeness of Aydin’s life to a stage play is all part of the game, and Ceylan often sends its theatricality echoing crazily back on itself.

Ceylan’s films are an acquired taste, and his oddball isolation drama Uzak and masterful police procedural Once Upon A Time in Anatolia are perhaps easier routes into his work for the curious. But this is more fiendishly intelligent stuff from the director, nudging back the limits of what we expect of cinema and also what it expects of us: a mighty tale of what becomes of a man when his heart goes into hibernation.
 
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