Full-bodied characters, brilliant/beautiful cinema from Turkey: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's WINTER SLEEP

I usually don't read reviews of films I'm about to cover, but in the case of WINTER SLEEP -- the new Palme d'Or-winning film from Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan -- once I finished reading Stuart Klawans' review in The Nation of The Imitation Game (a film I had already covered), I found myself continuing to read his thoughts on Ceylan's film. Why didn't I stop and put it aside to finish later? Well, Klawans is a very good writer, and once I'd begun, I didn't want to stop. So rapturous was his notice (you can read it here: click and keep scrolling down) that I immediately gave it to my spouse and asked if the film interested him. It did, despite its rather unusual length (three hours and 16 minutes: and spouse is not a fan of lengthy movies).

Although Mr. Klawans recommends seeing Winter Sleep in a theater, we were sent a DVD screener to watch. As shown on our large, widescreen TV, the quality was, in a word, sensational. Visually, this is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. While Ceylan's work (the filmmaker is shown at left) is often quite lovely to view, his latest outdoes any of his earlier films. From the incredible vistas that open the movie -- huge rocks sprouting from the mountain soil and homes that seem to emerge literally from the hills -- to the many interior shots, with lighting and color unlike anything I've seen, the movie is visual splendor. Still, visuals can only go so far. Incredibly, Mr. Ceylan also offers us a situation and characters as precise and special as those visuals, and then tops it all with some of the finest dialog -- also precise (in a manner that is able to gracefully unfurl character) and deep, sometimes profound -- that you're likely to hear in any film this year.

The movie is a wonder, a marvel. And while those three-plus hours don't exactly speed by, the material here -- characters and situation -- grabs us so strongly that we're not for a moment disengaged from this film. The situation blooms out of character, chiefly that of Aydin (Haluk Bilginer, below), our "hero," a wealthy man who owns the hotel that lies at the center of the film.

Around this cold sun circle the rest of the characters, including his young wife, Nihal (Melisa Sözen, shown below), and his sister, Necla (Demet Akbag, above, right). There is a scene midway in the movie between sister and brother that is one of the strongest (and longest) sections of dialog I think I've ever heard in a movie, unveiling character, philosophy, desire and fear, batting back and forth like a great tennis match of intellect and hubris that will have you on tenterhooks, trying to take it all in.

A subplot involving tenants of our wealthy fellow, a family quite down on its luck, further unveils the character of Aydin, as well as of the tenant family members themselves. A scene involving money changing hands toward the finale is one of the most quietly explosive and frustrating ever committed to film.

Ceylan's movie probes everything from class and religion to feminism, the male prerogative (in a culture such as Turkey's), and much more. There's even a reference to Hitler and the Jewish Holocaust that might tilt Turkish heads in the direction of their country's own Holocaust against Armenians, the responsibility for which -- unlike the Germans for their own, dreadful piece of history -- Turks have yet to accept. (I would like to think that Ceylan intends this "thought process," though being any more direct about it could probably end his career, at least in his home country.)

If I have given you any sense at all of how rich this movie is -- in so many ways -- then I'll consider this post a success. Winter Sleep has been selected by Turkey as its submission for Best Foreign Language Film. As crowded with quality as this year's selections surely are -- Force Majeure, The Circle, Ida, Rocks in My Pockets and Two Days, One Night (I'll cover that last one next week and haven't yet seen Beloved Sisters, Leviathan or Human Capital) to name but a few -- it strikes me at this point that Ceylan's film outshines all of what I have viewed.

Winter Sleep -- from Adopt Films and running 196 minutes -- opens this Friday, December 19, in New York City exclusively at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, and in Los Angeles on January 23 at Laemmle's Royal, Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5. To see all currently scheduled playdates, click here, and then scroll down and click on View Theaters and Showtimes.

Open Roads 2013: Elisa Fuksas' visually ravishing and quietly exploratory NINA

If you're hoping to discover at this year's Open Roads a load/lode of pure visual joy (my idea of it, anyway), don't miss NINA, the stunning narrative film debut of writer/director Elisa Fuksas. In fact, TrustMovies was so taken with this enchanting piece of work that he wants to see it all over again -- and soon. In terms of color, composition, space, light, and architecture (word has it Ms Fuksas, shown below, is the daughter of two of Italy's leading architects and was herself a student of the profession before turning to film-making), it has been a good long while since he has see anything as visually lovely and original as this film.

Yeah, yeah: beautiful, pretty, blah-blah-blah. But what about the story? Well, it's there all right, slight as can be, and mostly hinging on character (three of them: Our heroine, Nina; a young man who is attracted to her; and the little boy who lives in or around her building and is attracted to her in a somewhat different way), but this works just fine for the piece at hand, which, in any case, runs only 78 minutes. So if you possess even one appreciative bone in your body regarding the visual arts, I advise you to line up and take a look. (One of the two performances is already sold out, but I think there may be tickets or stand-bys for the second showing.)

The title character -- a young woman (is she some sort of student?) played with an odd combination of "otherness" and composure by actress Diane Fleri (above and below, right) -- has taken a job dog-and-other-pets-sitting, in addition to her occasional voice teaching, and is also taking (rather than giving) lessons in calligraphy, while almost all of her compatriots and anyone/
everyone else in what looks like some sort of academic environment are off for summer vacation. So she is left, nearly alone, to do her jobs and consider... what? Her life. Her goals. Her desires.

Into that life comes a goof-ily appealing young man (Luca Marinelli, above, center, and below, right; and also seen at this year's Open Roads in Every Blessed Day) who clearly has the hots for her (and she most likely for him) and a young boy who lives in the area and wants something -- friendship, love, mothering? -- from our heroine. Whom she will honor and/or grace with her possible permanent good will is the only plot point that might need fulfilling, though all the people we meet (including the boy and the young man, the pet owners, her calligraphy instructor, her voice students) are fun to get to know the little bit that we do.

Nina herself is something of a cipher, and I think that's what the filmmaker wants. Ms Fleri is lovely to look at and certainly possible to identify with (though her character is a bit of a twit: you fear for the lives of the animals under her care) and that is really all we need. Otherwise, we can bask in the utterly gorgeous visuals -- and wish we were there.

What an eye does Ms Fuksas have for place, person and color, and how well do these combine in her compositions!

The photos above and below barely begin to give you a sense of the beauty on tap in this film. You really have to see it to appreciate it, and the big screen is probably the best place to do so. I saw it on a big screen at home, and certainly will watch it all over again.

Nina plays twice during Open Roads: Saturday, June 8, at 4pm and again Monday, June 10, at 6:30pm. You can view the entire series, with features and showtimes shown, by clicking here.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's MICMACS proves a return to form (more or less)

The first five minutes of MICMACS conflates land mines, loss of family, an orphanage, escape, murder, one of the funniest medical surgeries on record -- and then a little Bogart & Bacall.  It juggles all this with speed, efficiency, humor, bleakness and charm.  These are the best first-five-minutes I've seen in ages -- near perfection, really -- and if the 100 minutes that follow them were as good, we've have an instant classic on our hands.  What comes after is never bad, but the movie goes up and down enough to make you wish for less and better.  (Knocking fifteen minutes off the running time would have helped immensely.)

If careers are arcs, then French writer-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (at left) must be about three-quarters of his way along the full ellipse. Making a movie approximately once every five years, he's gone from the very dark-but-funny (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children) to Hollywood mainstream fumble (Alien: Resurrection) to out-and-out cutesy schlock (Amélie, a movie that set my teeth permanently on edge and filled me for loathing for Audrey Tatou -- until nearly everything else she's done returned me to her fold) to the long-winded, event-filled (A Very Long Engagement) to this latest outing called Micmacs à tire-larigot in the original French -- which proves a kind of homecoming.  More or less.

Jeunet's work has always been dark. Death hovers -- even if you can't quite see the guy (or be certain which of several he is). Rude humor bubbles up consistently, as does sentimentality of a rather gross sort.  Yet the mix is usually so wild and surprising that we go with it.  Filled with devices of the Rube Goldberg sort (were Goldberg chained in a cellar and fed roaches during his childhood years), the movies seem oddly concerned with the way things work, which is often badly for those who people his films.

With MicMacs, Jeunet has hit upon the best new villain in some time.  Forget terrorists -- so yesterday -- the bad guys here are competing arms dealers (André Dussollier, above left, and Nicolas Marié, above right) who've sewn the soil with the kind of land mines that killed the father of our hero (Dany Boon, below) in those first five minutes.  They also manufactured the bullet embedded in his brain that was too dangerous to remove and so threatens his very existence.  A perfect reason and recipe for vengeance, right?  And so it is.

M. Boon falls in with a gang (the titular MicMacs) that includes the likes of Yolande Moreau (below, from Séraphine, criminally underused here), Dominique Pinon and a cute contortionist, played by Julie Ferrier (further below).

Everything moves smoothly along as vengeance appears nearer and nearer.  And this is where thing go, if not exactly awry, then maybe a little too smoothly. Mid-movie, we grow briefly tired of it all, until there's a bump in the proceedings which seems to bring things back to life.

Don't get me wrong: MicMacs is often a lot of fun, and visually -- as usual with Jeunet -- it's a treasure-trove of the bleak combined with the beautiful and the funny.  If only those first five minutes were not so damned brilliant, promising much to come that only partially arrives.

MicMacs, from Sony Pictures Classics, opens Friday, May 28, in New York City at the AMC Empire 25 and at the Angelika Film Center -- and then the following week -- June 4 -- in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Diego and San Francisco.