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MovieMail's Review
Ceylan's latest film is a brooding film noir filmed in breathtaking widescreen images. Pasquale Iannone investigates.
Jean-Pierre Melville famously described his 1972 film Un Flic as an attempt to ‘make a colour film in black and white, in which there is only one tiny detail to remind us that we really are watching a film in colour’. In Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan employs a desaturated colour palette to similar effect. Moreover, as with those late Melvillian thrillers – and indeed like more recent films such as Béla Tarr’s The Man from London – Ceylan’s film deconstructs the traditional film noir.
Set in present-day Turkey, the film tells of Servet, an ambitious politician whose involvement in a hit-and-run accident threatens to destroy his chances in the forthcoming elections. He asks his driver Eyüp to take the blame, with the promise of a monthly stipend for his wife Hacer and teenage son Ismail, together with a lump sum upon his release from prison. With Eyüp behind bars, Hacer begins a brief affair with Servet whilst Ismail becomes embroiled in dangerous company, returning home one evening badly beaten. Upon his release from prison, Eyüp becomes ever more suspicious of his wife, who has fallen helplessly in love with the married Servet.
The title of Ceylan’s film (which according to the director was only settled upon during post-production) alludes to the proverbial refusal to see, hear or speak evil and the central characters – father, mother and son – find themselves inextricably caught up in a chain of denial. As with his acclaimed previous films Uzak and Climates, Ceylan deftly subverts classical Hollywood syntax with a narrative which is purposefully elliptical. Key events (the car crash, Ismail’s beating, Servet and Hacer’s lovemaking) take place off screen with characters left to grapple with the aftermath.
The widescreen compositions are often breathtaking (Hacer and Ismail at their apartment window, Hacer pleading with Servet not to leave her). As with the director’s earlier work, much of the power of Three Monkeys relies on the non-verbal, with landscape in particular charged with heightened significance. Ceylan, without recourse to a musical score, also makes scrupulous use of sound design to enhance the film’s unsettling, ominous atmosphere.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest film tells the story of a family blown apart by lies and non-communication. When a politician involved in a car accident asks his driver Eyup to take the rap - a short jail sentence - in return for a financial reward, the driver's wife and teenage son are inevitably affected by Eyup's decision to take the money. Wishing to help her son, Hacer approaches Servet for an advance, and soon gets more involved with him than she bargained for. Before long, all four characters find themselves trapped in a tangled web of guilt and deceit...
