MUBI

Critically acclaimed Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (“Distant” & “Climates”) cemented his previous success with this slow-burning neo-noir which won him the Best Director Award at the 61st Cannes Film Festival and was Turkey’s unsuccessful submission for the 81st Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film Oscar amongst a slew of Yeşilçam Awards and international film accolades.

When family man Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl) goes to prison for a hit-and-run committed by his wannabe politician boss Servet (Ercan Kesal), his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and wayward son İsmail (Ahmet Rıfat Şungar) find their lives beginning to fall apart, and the process is only expedited by Eyüp’s release some nine months later.

Popular Turkish folk singer Yavuz Bingöl presents a wonderfully hunched and dishevelled presence at the head of a family that features the haggard beauty of Hatice Aslan and the angst ridden brow of Ahmet Rıfat Şungar who both won Yeşilçam Awards as well as the occasional unwelcome interference of sweaty co-writer Ercan Kesal.

The Yeşilçam Award-winning cinematography of Gökhan Tiryaki (“Alone” & “Climates”) transforms Istanbul into a suitably dark and brooding backdrop for the bare-bone story-line of Nuri Bilge Ceylan et al, but the dark beauty of the cinematography isn’t quite enough to hold attention and the film begins to drag long before the leaden denouement.

“Do we have anyone else?”

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has made his mark as one of contemporary cinema’s finest directors with films in which not very much happens. In Distant (Uzak), a despondent Istanbul photographer struggles to accommodate a cousin who has come to the city from the country in search of work, while Climates (Iklimer) tells the story of a protracted break-up between a self-obsessed University professor and his quiet, submissive wife. Probing the nuances of characters and relationships tends to be the order of the day for Ceylan, so it is a surprise that his latest film has all the ingredients of a good old-fashioned crime melodrama. Lust, betrayal, deception, revenge and murder all have parts to play in Three Monkeys’ heady, suspenseful brew.

The plot is built around the repercussions of a hit-and-run on a stormy night, shot by Ceylan in typically oblique, understated fashion in the film’s opening scene. A high, still camera observes the beam of a car’s headlights slowly disappearing into the inky distance. The sound of screeching tyres follows – someone has been hit, the car’s registration spotted, and the bleary-eyed perpetrator – Servet (Kesal), a politician running for election – has a problem. His solution is to ask his driver, Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl, a popular folk singer in his native country), to take the fall for the accident in return for a lucrative payday.

It only takes a glimpse of Eyüp, hunched and forlorn in his shabby, cramped family apartment, to realise that his economic status will seal his compliance and subsequent imprisonment, leaving his wife Hacer (Aslan) and teenage son Ismail (Sungar) to fend for themselves. The threat of a full-scale domestic crisis hangs heavy in the air – the stormy clouds gathering around the apartment being both narratively portentous and aesthetically accommodating, paving the way for Director of Photography Gökhan Tiryaki’s gloomy, desaturated look.

Early on an argument about Ismail’s reluctance to either go to work or apply himself at college indicates tension brewing between mother and son. Ceylan skilfully portrays the two characters’ growing introspection through intelligent, artful framing, rarely placing Ismail and Hacer in the same shot. In one scene where they do appear on screen together, they are viewed from an Ozu-like vantage point near the living room floor. Ismail sits half off screen with just his legs looming large in the right foreground, while Hacer lies sprawled on a sofa set against the rear wall. Significantly, while Ozu often opted for that camera position to observe domestic interaction at a natural height, Ceylan uses it to convey emotional discord through compositional chaos.

Violence never seems far away in Three Monkeys, and after Ismail gets beaten up (we are left to speculate on how he is spending his time), Hacer seeks an advance from Servet on her husband’s guilt payment. It is at this point that the story becomes fraught with dangerous possibilities, which only intensify when Eyüp is released from prison. Somewhat disconcertingly, it quickly becomes clear that this man might not quite be the patsy that his actions in the first act suggested.

While this intriguing scenario (written by Ceylan, his wife Ebru and actor Kesal) would befit Hollywood directors such as Huston, Lang and Preminger, ‘neo-noir’ seems an ill-fitting description of Three Monkeys, and not only because Ceylan operates outside genre in a restrained, riveting style that’s completely his own. More significantly, the director’s suggestive, elliptical approach takes the film way beyond pulp. There is an apparitional presence in the warring household, suggested by the windy, watery sound design, and depicted visually in two genuinely disquieting moments, that transforms the crime movie plotting into a mere catalyst for a deeply tragic portrait of a family torn apart by guilt and grief.

Nearly as good as his debut film, Uzak, but not quite. But this Turkish art-house film is Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s elegiac ode to the disintegration of our society’s basic unit – the family. But what makes this film stands out is the style employed by Ceylan that turn most kitchen-sink and social realist melodrama look very sophisticated with his cinematography, editing and slow-burning pace.

But I would love to see this film directed by the great Lino Brocka, who was a more experienced director of this genre. Three Monkeys reminds me of Brocka’s Insiang (1976), the late director’s effective and strong film that tackles social disintegration seen through the crumbling family that Insiang (Hilda Koronel) ever hope to protect and save.