Nuri Bilge Ceylan: 'Three Monkeys'

When Robert Lowell said a poem is an event, not the record of an event, he was referring to a sort of self-sufficiency that can belong to a work in any medium - provided that work really flies, and is not simply an exercise in form. When a film achieves this state, it doesn't need to be 'about' anybody or anything, though it might possess that dimension - it is a phenomenon in its own right. Turkish photographer-turned-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan achieves this sort of phenomenal effect with his latest feature Three Monkeys. The film is a masterpiece, winning for Ceylan Best Director at Cannes in 2008. His earlier films are beautiful to watch, and they scatter before us some lovely and mysterious visual portents of what is to come, but Three Monkeys just transcends expectations altogether. Every element of the film is flawlessly synchronized - sound, light, color, scene, character and narrative all reinforce one another in variation, reprise and counterpoint. There are just four characters, woven together in a tightly braided ring which closes in infinitesimal degrees of action and reaction toward a conclusion which has in retrospect a strong whiff of the inevitable, of having proceeded from its postulates, as literary critic Lawrence Powell would say, in the same way a Shakespearean tragedy proceeds. When aspiring politician Servet is involved in a hit-and-run accident on the eve of the election, he asks his driver Eyup to take the rap in exchange for an unspecified sum. Eyup's wife Hacer and teenaged son Ismail are left exposed and vulnerable by his detention for a nine-month spell in prison, and when Hacer begins a short affair with Eyup's old boss, the characters are realigned according to their fate in a slow, deliberate uncoiling which is quietly devastating to watch. These are people doomed to struggle inside the malignant course which is their destiny, a spiralling shape like the unbroken peel of an orange that not only swerves through acts of adultery, deception and murder, but even hints at a sort of eternal return that extends to people generally. It is a shape that is coaxed out of darkness into light, and its final bend into eternity doesn't arrive until the penultimate scene, in which a twist of the original set-up is inflicted upon a character as peripheral to Eyup's life as Eyup is to Servet.

The faces of these tormented souls are microscopically observed; this is a story told in beads of sweat, in buds of day-old stubble and quickened crows-feet, in narrowed eyes and expressions of suspicion, regret, alarm, surprise, appeal, resignation, nausea and shame ... it is a literary treatment of the suffering human animal, an exercise in observation reminiscent of great Russian novels. For cinematic antecedents, Tarkovsky comes immediately to mind, especially the interiors of Stalker, though Ceylan cites the Japanese Ozu as his favorite director. The film makes use of super-high contrasts bled of color and reinfused with one or two color patches close on the spectrum; a typical scene would have an otherworldly hue altogether, of softened blacks and creams, with a touch of pale blue and perhaps some green in the waves, or of dense shadows with flares of silver which bend and pool up around hard edges. In an interview with The Guardian, Ceylan speaks of his preponderance of reds, but I suppose like a poem the film is open to different readings, because it was the blues and greens and even occasional hints of yellow I noticed and loved. This use of color and light says something important which is nevertheless difficult to articulate. It arouses a response, a recognition which originates just below the rational, as color in paintings does; it references meanings which have to do with our silent experience of life, our felt experience, of sadness, or stasis, or danger. Sometimes light is used in very purposeful ways - there is a remarkable scene in which Ismail's long-dead brother re-emerges from light into form, as if death is a landscape of light so dazzling it renders the dead invisible by over-exposure. But its deployment is more often a matter of suggestion, of oblique understandings which take place on levels of instinct and emotion.

Ceylan uses sound in similar ways, inserting isolated aural signals into deep chasms of intimate silence. The effect of this minimalist approach is to delineate a psychological angle relative to the moment, such as the way in which memories are formed, or the way in which time distorts experience and vice versa. When Hacer is driving home with Servet for the first time, the words he speaks during one part of the journey are superimposed over a scene of the two of them sitting in silence some moments earlier. This slight aural disconnect illustrates in the most understated way imaginable how we can experience one another in the moment and in memory, and how understanding of events can be delayed. Sound effects in this dreamlike narrative are never arbitrary or incidental. They are divided between the intimate (squeaking doors, rustling fabric, running water) and the universal, atmospheric, or extensive (locomotive wheels, wind in grass, rain, thunder) with very little in between, a variation on the extremes of black and white we see in the visual register.

Such contrasts serve again to locate this small knot of characters within a sort of grand neo-mythic frame. They are highlighted, amplified, isolated, picked out against a stark elemental backdrop like figures in a Greek play. The film's final scene makes this explicit, as Eyup stands in tiny silhouetted human form against a gorgeous moving panorama of waves, thunderclouds, light-spokes and rain. There is a static quality to this image which refers back to the filmmaker's origins as photographer, and it is precisely in these origins that I think the film as a whole derives its genetic force, because photographic and visual art contain the qualities of self-sufficiency, of finality, and of the absolute that are distinguishing features of this film. Three Monkeys is definitely an event, an experience both voluptuous (in its surfaces) and austere (in its tone), and because it exercises the microcosmic and macrocosmic imagination simultaneously, we might spend a lifetime tracing its mythic themes in one of its grains of sand.