Film 6 for the Letterboxd Season Challenge. The other films I plan to watch for the challenge are here.
Week 6: Eastern European Films
Challenge: Watch an unseen feature by Jan Svankmayer, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or Bela Tarr.
Film I Chose: Winter Sleep
Well, I picked this one because I’ve seen a good bit from the other filmmakers, but had only seen (and liked) Once Upon a Time in Anatolia from Ceylan. I should’ve realized from Anatolia that I should expect some length to this one, but the 196 minute running time still came as a surprise to me. The real surprise is that despite my busy schedule forcing me to take Winter Sleep in three parts, it was never boring and I don’t think I would’ve felt the length even if I had been able to carve out the time all at once.
Ceylan manages to do something quite amazing – take a very simple story and make it both complex through its relationships and compelling through a series of lengthy but perfectly modulated conversations. Main character Aydin is a wealthy man with several businesses and properties who’s currently living in his hotel in Cappadocia along with his beautiful younger wife and his somewhat bitter sister, and spends most of his time writing moralistic editorials despite his rejection of religion. He clashes with his sister over how to react to evil, with his wife over how to run her charity project, and with the local imam over the rent.
Though it plays out mostly in conversations, which are actually rarely heated despite the practical and intellectual import of them, the film carries a weight and sense of consequence throughout, as you can see on each character’s face how these measured interactions are actually affecting them. The centerpiece is certainly the set of conversations as Aydin and his wife Nihal discuss her charity – he feels she’s naive and needs his help, and she feels as if this is the only aspect of her life he doesn’t already control. It’s like a microcosm of seemingly benign but insidious patriarchal thinking, and the way the two actors play it off is fantastic.
The Cappadocian landscape is almost a character as well, as Anatolia was in Ceylan’s previous film. The hotel is carved into rock formations, adding to the weight and gravity of the film, and giving it an earthy quality grounding these often intellectualized characters. The title also refers to hibernation in Turkish, and there’s definitely a sense of the madness that can occur when people are confined (or feel confined, as both Nihal and Aydin’s sister do) together in a small place for an extended time, which is only exacerbated as winter sets in toward the end of the film, threatening even more isolation from the rest of the world.
When I realized I was in for a 3 1/2 hour experience and admittedly considered changing my film for the week, I complained a bit on Facebook, and a friend urged me to give the film a shot. I’m very glad I did, because the experience is something special, and even though I liked Anatolia, I would’ve put this off indefinitely if I didn’t have motivation to get to it.
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