Reprint of a New Yorker review no longer available on the magazine's website. Six years later, this review finally prompted me to see Ceylon's Distant.

MEN’S SECRETS
by ANTHONY LANE
“Distant” and “The Return.”
Issue of 2004-03-15
Posted 2004-03-08

Nine months have passed since the last Cannes Film Festival, and we are still reaping the benefits, or, if you prefer, suffering the consequences. It would appear that the mood du jour on the sunny Riviera last year was a lightly hypnotized flow of daze and dread. Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” which won the Palme d’Or, opened and shut here a couple of months back, Lars Von Trier’s “Dogville” will shortly be annoying people in a theatre near you, and now we have “Distant,” a picture so stately and becalmed that its undisputed climax comes with the trapping of a very thin mouse.

Yet the movie does have strange adhesive powers. From the first shot, of a man trekking through a snowy field, with the thin white finger of a minaret poking up in the background, we are on unfamiliar ground. The film was made by the Turkish writer and director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and the plodder in the snow is Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), who has been laid off from his factory job in the provinces and is hitching a ride to Istanbul in search of better things. He goes to stay with his cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), and you can tell how eagerly Mahmut is awaiting his kinsman from the fact that he completely forgets to stay home and let the poor guy in. That’s the hook: throw together two mopers, well into the woods of middle age, and see what happens. If this were a Billy Wilder picture, they would bloom in each other’s company, but this is Istanbul, under foul and glutinous skies, and what we have is a pair of Walter Matthaus and no Jack Lemmon.

Mahmut is a commercial photographer, and he would probably class himself as an intellectual, although in truth he belongs to a lesser, more widespread, and more entertaining species: the intellectual wanna-be. He has a study seething with books, and a peppery beard ideal for thoughtful stroking, but when a friend invites him to a philosophical gathering he asks, “Will there be any girls?” What Özdemir’s coolly hemmed-in performance suggests is not so much a mind burdened by the weight of ideas—a staple of European literary inquiry—as a man who has fewer ideas than he would care to admit, plus a body aghast at its faltering appetites. There is a beautiful shot of Mahmut held sharply in the camera’s gaze, stuck fast in ruefulness, while behind him, out of focus but still readable as a shifting, voluptuous shape, an unnamed lover removes her clothes. The offer is there, but he cannot respond, and, after her departure, he sadly seduces himself.

The grief of sexual failure, with its presagings of death, is a subject rarely touched upon by movies, for obvious reasons. People don’t pay ten bucks to be warned of their shrivelling desires; they pay ten bucks to witness two or more flab-free characters writhe seamlessly on creamy sheets, their approaching bliss invariably signalled by the rising moan of a saxophone on the soundtrack, as if Kenny G. were hiding under the bed. Contrast the lumpen Yusuf, glancing at the slit skirt of a woman on the subway (she catches the glance and moves away), or the childless Mahmut discovering that his ex-wife is leaving for Canada with her new partner and planning to have a baby. What is most winning about “Distant,” however, is that it can peer past the grief and find a scrap of comedy. The two cousins sit and gaze at Mahmut’s huge flat-screen TV; their choice of viewing is Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” possibly the least promising film that you could choose for an evening of family harmony. In particular, they are watching the infamous trolley scene, in which three taciturn men ride a clanking railroad into a land of desolation known as “the Zone.” Yusuf considers this, gives up in despair, and goes to bed, whereupon the furtive Mahmut waits a minute, then ejects the videotape and substitutes another. The TV screen is suddenly awash with pornography, as cheap and cheerful as it comes.

I know how he feels. This is not to disparage Tarkovsky, whose movies are unmatched in grave remorselessness, but there is no dishonor, whether we be porno junkies or thriller buffs, in confessing to a lust for sensation. I saw “Distant” soon after seeing “School of Rock,” and the two pictures struck me as a flawless double bill, each forcing you to thirst after the other. “Distant” certainly brims with the anxiety of influence; it is more than prepared to match the challenging slowness of “Stalker” but also keen to grub around in petty familiarities from which Tarkovsky might have averted his eyes—Mahmut cursing at the crumbs of tobacco that Yusuf leaves on the living-room floor, or driving through a landscape that shouts out to be photographed but deciding, with a shrug, that he can’t be bothered to stop. And the moral is: you can keep your brow high, but it’s a hell of a sweat.

Yet the visions that linger, after “Distant” has drawn to its sensationally grumpy close, are as startling as anything that Tarkovsky devised in “The Sacrifice” or “Mirror.” As Yusuf walks down by the docks (he dreams in vain of a job at sea), the camera follows him patiently through the snow and comes upon a ship—rusted, half sunken, tilted to one side, and basically left to die. Yusuf hardly notices it, but it’s like some relic of a forgotten civilization, or a frozen mammoth. Finally, there is a heart-seizing scene at the airport, where Mahmut goes to see off his ex-wife without wishing to be seen himself. At one point, she looks in his direction, but he slips behind a pillar, like a shadow or a spy, and she is left, as ever, unconvinced of his presence. If you are pained by a lost love, or you can’t get it up, or you can never find anywhere to have a smoke these days, or you simply enjoy shivering and stamping in the winter of your discontent, then here is the movie for you.

There is more emotion, a great salty wave of the stuff, on show in the opening scene of “The Return” than in the whole of “Distant.” A group of kids clamber to the top of a wooden tower and launch themselves into the chilly water below. The youngest boy, Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov), is too chicken, or too wise, to jump, and he stays up there, shaking with cold and shame, until his mother climbs up and folds him in her arms. It is not often that you feel drained after ten minutes in a cinema, so how to account for the gusts of love and fear that sweep across this small Russian picture? Well, it is the first film to be directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, and what it shares with other coruscating débuts, from “The Four Hundred Blows” to “Badlands,” is a sense that it had to be made. There is a controlled wildness at the heart of such movies, whose narratives ask to be handled as delicately as explosives.

Eleven-year-old Ivan and his teen-age brother, Andrey (Vladimir Garin), live with their ravishing mother, as well as their unspeaking grandmother, in a house that feels as serene as a monastery and as barren as a jail. Into this peaceful setup comes their father (Konstantin Lavronenko), a man with no name, returned, after eleven years, from an ordeal—war, perhaps, or exile, or imprisonment. He suits the place, having the cropped features and the ceaseless practicality of a soldier, but also the disturbing core of certainty that we associate with the devout. (He first appears foreshortened, asleep on a bed, naked from the waist up, in a straight steal from Mantegna’s “Dead Christ.”) After a rest, however, he declares that he will be taking his sons, whom he barely knows, on a fishing trip.

Zvyagintsev is no sentimentalist, and the journey he describes is a voyage less of discovery than of bafflement, shot through with every strain of desperation—a car sucked into the mud, say, with Andrey howling at his dad for landing them in this mess and getting whacked against the side of the car. Two minutes later, though, he is radiant with triumph, having taken the wheel and driven the vehicle clear, and once again our feelings are put through a juddering mill, as if we were children ourselves. By the time the boys and their father reach a deserted island, having found a boat, recaulked it, and rowed through fog, we know that they are drifting into a showdown.

As Andrey and Ivan play on the shore, or in the mushroom-rich forest, their father digs a hole and unearths a suitcase. Inside the case is a box, but that is as far as the movie goes in its game of Russian dolls. The box guards its secret as closely as the one that Catherine Deneuve’s client displayed, with conspiratorial pride, in “Belle de Jour,” and we are encouraged to reflect that something of consuming value to one man may be worthless to another, and that, had the boys ever opened the box, they might have tossed it overboard as trash. Forget buried treasure; their father is mystery enough, and the hold that he exerts on them, in his twin guise of tyrant and teacher, will be burned into their young souls like the image on a photographic plate. If there is a murmur of allegory here, of the Russia that was ruled with unsmiling rigor for seventy years or so—as brief, in historical terms, as the scorched and stormy week experienced by Ivan and Andrey—then Zvyagintsev is too smart and subtle to press the point. Decide for yourself, but be quick: “The Return” is now in mid-run at Lincoln Plaza, and you must seek it out before it leaves town.

--ANTHONY LANE in The New Yorker, March 15, 2004, p.154; reprinted online at Za Granizza - Киноведение .