Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uzak (Distant) is among the most impactful films about loneliness and disillusionment. Never have the filmmaker's signature immobile frames been more effective than in this film, where he opts for minimal camera movement. It is a film marked by lengthy silences and moments of reflection. Solitude and the unwelcome intrusion of it are strongly felt. Ceylan is an intuitive filmmaker who is blessed with the gift of knowing how long to hold a shot. The shots do not run longer than necessary. Ceylan employs precise timing and choreography to execute these shots, staged in such a manner that the viewer takes in all the information that Ceylan intends to convey. This makes sense, as Ceylan was a photographer before transitioning to filmmaking.
The entire film is structured around the disruption of the seemingly serene and uninterrupted existence of Mahmut, a lonely, middle-aged photographer. The "culprit" is his young, unemployed cousin Yusuf, who arrives in town seeking a job. The latter's barging into Mahmut's solitary abode is not intentional; he is desperate, but Mahmut is nonetheless displeased. The older man, however, does not show it initially; it is not quite obvious at first. You slowly begin to see signs of his irritation when Yusuf returns home empty-handed on more than one occasion. Bored and with nothing to do, Yusuf starts stalking a woman living in the neighbourhood.
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Not much is happening in Mahmut’s life either. He is not an in-demand photographer. We learn Mahmut is not married because we see him with a sex worker when the film opens. The rest of the time, he is in front of the television—in one scene, he switches from Andrei Tarkovsky’s arthouse classic Stalker to a pornographic cassette when Yusuf goes to sleep, and then immediately switches back when Yusuf returns a few minutes later. Yusuf is in desperate need of money. We occasionally see him speaking to his mother on the phone and mouthing curses when she tells him about her insulting landlord.
Furthermore, Yusuf is not exactly what one would call the ideal housemate. He leaves smelly shoes on the living room floor next to Mahmut's chair and keeps the light on in his room when he is not in. It is inevitable that Mahmut would be annoyed by this. The actor playing Mahmut, Muzaffer Özdemir, has a knack for communicating a great deal through his facial expressions and movements. Like a slow-release capsule, Ceylan takes his time to reveal details about Mahmut in as few words as possible.
We eventually learn that he is divorced. His ex-wife is now married to someone else and tells him that the abortion she and Mahmut once decided upon has left her infertile—a fact that greatly depresses her present husband.
There are plenty of shots which illustrate Ceylan’s mastery of composition and timing. Every film he has produced thus far is a testament to this. He frequently places his actors in vast, open spaces with no other person in sight. After all, this is a film about two lonely souls, and one cannot portray boredom without making the audience actually feel it—something Ceylan does exceptionally well, mirroring the work of Michelangelo Antonioni before him.
Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, the film—which Ceylan called his "most autobiographical" (he admitted that 40% of it was drawn from his own life)—also won both Muzaffer and Mehmet Emin Toprak (who played Yusuf) the Best Actor trophies at Cannes. The honour was posthumous in the case of the latter: Toprak, who was Ceylan's cousin, died tragically in a car crash shortly after completing filming.
The film is considered the final instalment in Ceylan's 'Provincial Trilogy', which comprises Kasaba (1997) and Clouds of May (1999).
