Winter Sleep
Kis uykusu

2014 was a year of long, trancelike movies that either cast a spell on viewers or tried their patience. Filmmakers concerned themselves less with crafting traditional narrative structures and concentrated far more on evoking ideas, memories, and emotional responses in their audiences.  Along with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, 2014’s Palme d'Or winner Winter Sleep best exemplifies the expansive, contemplative nature of this year in cinema. Winter Sleep, a familial drama from the acclaimed Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Uzak, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), explores the divide between the privileged and the powerless in present day Turkey. Drawing inspiration, themes, and particulars from two Anton Chekhov stories, "Excellent People" and "The Wife," and blending them with ideas and elements from writers like Dostoyevsky and Voltaire (all of whom are credited in one way or another in the film) Ceylan creates a timeless meditation on class, caste, and heritage. Paradoxically, his film also serves as a timely metaphor for contemporary society—both Western and Middle-Eastern. What Ceylan accomplishes in this epic but intimate drama is no small feat, so the fact that his dialogue-heavy movie runs for a challenging 3 hours and 15 minutes is entirely justifiable. Some audiences may find the picture maddeningly slow, but fans of Ingmar Bergman will recognize and savor Ceylan’s similar ability to draw viewers in to his hypnotic world. Also like Bergman’s best work, the film conveys vast amounts of narrative, thematic, and intellectual concepts through stark imagery and heated exchanges of dialogue.

Winter Sleep takes place primarily in a posh hotel that caters to European tourists. Named the Othello and carved into a craggy, mountainous landscape, the place is owned by Aydın, a former actor who, after inheriting land and wealth from his father, now lives a comfortable, insulated, self-involved existence as a hotelier, landlord, and writer of editorials for the local newspaper. We first experience Aydın in the way of the disinterested guests who pass through his establishment. He seems quite an agreeable fellow on the surface,  someone we assume is a well-regarded leading citizen of the area. But the more we see Aydın through the eyes of those who really know him—his tenants, his employees, his friends, and, most especially, his young wife and divorced sister who both live with him—the more we come to understand why no one who knows him likes him very much.

In Aydın, Haluk Bilginer delivers one of this year’s most multi-faceted performances. Bilginer is best known for his five-year stint on the long-running BBC soap opera EastEnders in the ‘80s and for playing Turkish bad guys in Hollywood films ranging from Elaine May’s Ishtar (1987) to Tom Tykwer’s The International (2009). In Winter Sleep, he creates a complex character that resonates as an entirely relatable human being as well as an exemplar of a universally recognizable privileged male mindset. Like the nation of Turkey itself, Aydın and his hotel literally straddle the border between modern secular society and ancient Islamic culture. Aydın is a mass of contradictions, constantly expounding his lofty opinions on art and culture, religion, and community, while lacking any real connection to nearly every subject he pontificates about. He views himself as a benevolent, highly evolved thinker. But he is an intellectual whose insights serve no useful function, an entitled individual more interested in winning arguments than entering into any meaningful discourse.

While Aydın consistently wields the upper hand in most exchanges, he’s equally matched when he gets into confrontations with his family members. His wife and sister know him better than he knows himself, and they call him out in a series of engrossing arguments. The best of these articulate quarrels stretches on for something like 20 minutes. Aydın and his sister argue specifics, but their interplay has the ring of universal authenticity—a verbal confrontation that could happen between any cohabitating siblings in any part of the world.

The delivery speed in many of Winter Sleep’s dialogue scenes may make it difficult for slow readers of sub-titles (like myself) to catch every single nuance, yet we never feel we’re missing the point. Ceylan and his co-writer (his wife and frequent collaborator Nuri Bilge Ceylan) build pauses into these tongue-lashings that enable both the viewer and the characters to catch up. During these moments we can see on their faces how the words the characters are saying and hearing affect them. The counterpoints to these intimate scenes—often lit by fire and candlelight and shot in penetrating close-ups—are the exquisite, open, sunlit exteriors. In these magnificently bleak widescreen landscapes we see the solitary Aydın walking around and surveying his beautiful, stark, crumbling empire. 

The expression winter sleep translates literally to hibernation in Turkish. The title poses the question of whether Aydin's heart and soul are long dead or merely locked away dormant under the spell of incurious stagnancy. Like all the issues this haunting and memorable film raises, it is a fascinating quandary to contemplate.