Critics reviews

There is a distance between Ceylan's two protagonists, as I have mentioned. There is also the distance between social classes that often cannot be overcome... Uzak is essentially a film about growing isolation and solitude; it is about an often self-inflicted distance the reasons of which aren't explained in the film. Indeed, this is one of the trademarks of Ceylan's films: things are the way they are. The director doesn't try to explain them, he simply shows them.

It’s a startlingly quiet film that is buoyed by a droll humor, splendid visuals and bittersweet reflections into the human condition. It’s, also, an emotionally powerful film by a major artist who has arrived on the international scene.

More often than not, Ceylan favors camera and sound effects over dialogue and action to suggest their feelings of remove, blurring the foreground or background of a shot to make focal distance seem physical or suffusing scenes with the far-off horns and lapping waves of the harbor. While it takes a little patience to engage with it, Distant has an indelible sense of city life that can't be expressed in words.

It attains a clarity and simplicity that lesser filmmakers could strain every sinew trying to achieve without ever getting anywhere. To Ceylan, these things are as easy as breathing. Uzak is about loneliness and depression, and particularly the kind of depression suffered by men of a certain age who would cut their tongues out rather than admit they are depressed. Yet the film itself is, gloriously, the opposite of depressing. It is gentle and deeply humane, and even ventures into an arena of delicate visual comedy with a shy adroitness that Woody Allen might admire. Watching it is like taking a deep draught of cold, clear water.

Uzak is richly contemplative and languid filmmaking, in which Ceylan's camera observes with calm detachment two men who are struggling to cope with the loneliness and transience of modern urban living.

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has made a semi-autobiographical movie about the isolated way that people live in cities and the distance that people put between themselves and others. "Distant" has droll moments of humor and a succession of sumptuously shot scenes (both indoors and out, including one showing a grand mosque at dusk). Unwanted guests have a benefit: They can remind us of our own dislikes and vulnerabilities, and help us come to terms (or not) with them.

Distant is the sort of spare, demanding work whose pared-down aesthetic requires a viewer who’s prepared to abnegate movie going’s instant gratifications. It’s the cinematic equivalent of fasting, undertaken with hopes of a glimpse at something larger than ourselves or at least larger than the screen, and of epiphanies beyond the facile pat-on-the-ass pep talks provided by mere “entertainment.”

The caginess of the performers and the personality added by the evocative cinematography both go a long way in adding weight to “Distant”. But the self-imposed dreariness prevails: eventually, the problem is the material itself. Such an accurate depiction of cramped spirits, small-mindedness and men unable to make changes in their lives takes its toll. “Distant” feels as if it's going nowhere in no particular hurry, and finally leaves us distant from its characters.

The entire film is stitched together from a collection of long shots that stress the expansive emotional distance between the odd couple. This deliberate strategy is borderline strenuous but works for the most part because it’s also completely uncomplicated.