Winter Sleep: Stuck in Comfort Zone
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Turkish drama, Winter Sleep, has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival 2014 and focuses on the vicious cycle of desperation.
Güner Or
“...Nobody does anything but sit and philosophise about life” says Arkadina, Sorin's sister in The Sea-gull, by Anton Chekhov. The play consisting of conflicts and conversations between the characters takes place on a country estate. If you are wealthy, well-educated, intellectual person living in a city; when you are retired, what would you do? Escaping from the city is well-known dream of some intellectuals who live in Turkey, especially in Istanbul. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep, inspired by certain Chekhov stories, is fed by tensions within a family that lives together in an isolated area.
Winter Sleep premiered at the 67th Cannes Film Festival on May 16 at the Grand Theatre Lumiere. The film won The International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci) Award and the top honor Palme d'Or at Cannes. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film, starring Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sözen, Demet Akbag. The film was released on Friday, June 13th.
In the Chekhovian film, protagonist character Aydın (Haluk Bilginer) is the son of a rich landowner. He is a retired theatre actor who runs a boutique hotel in Cappadocia, a historical region in Central Anatolia. he keeps himself occupied as the columnist of the local newspaper. Nihal (Melisa Sözen), his younger wife, has dedicated her life to helping poor people who are living in the region; some of them are their renters. Necla (Demet Akbag), his divorced sister, an educated, unemployed woman, leads a passionless life. Aydın knows how to enjoy himself while two women suffer from their domestic lives. The characters reveal themselves mostly through their conversations, not through their actions.
Aydın has some problems with other people even though he is pleased about himself. First, he has to deal with family conflicts. There are a great deal of ethical issues about good and evil, life decisions and failure, moral values such as honour, honesty and pride. Being idle is the main source of boredom, according to Aydın. However, he is found guilty of ruining their lives. A question has an answer in it: Which one is easy; taking responsibility for your life or blaming others? Secondly, dissonance with locals constantly bothers him. The difference between wealth and poverty manifests itself dramatically in their encounters. The sharp gap between vulgarity and urbanity could be seen obviously in their talks and behaviours. Bringing up acts of charity, a hypocrisy is unmasked. A crucial question we should ask: Do the poor need our pity? Because it could be said compassion is always accompanied by humiliation. The film includes rich materials based upon observations of life, represents the duality of nature and provokes many questions in mind. Another thing is, it appears that the realistic scenes of violence related animals, comparing such violence they experienced, also have a symbolic meaning.