I associate Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan with long takes of expansive landscape from the couple of movies I’ve seen of his. And the opening shot of Distant (2002; aka Uzak) fulfils that association, as a solitary figure trudges across a field, a small town in the distance and a road in the foreground from where the camera is positioned. There are beautiful scenes of characters looking at the space around them, particularly when we are mainly in the portside areas of Istanbul. The most surprising thing to me about Distant was that a lot of the film is set in an apartment, and is focused on framing within a shared interior. This is a film about sharing space, a guest in your home and distant relationships being tested by time together.
Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) has travelled to the city to find work. Back home, there is none with the factory where he and his father have worked, letting go many workers. In the city, there is Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir), a photographer who once had dreams of making films like his hero Andrei Tarkovsky, but earns his crust photographing product for a tiling factory. Mahmut puts up Yusuf in his spare room with the understanding that he’ll be there for a week as he looks for work as a sailor. The film follows the growing tension between the characters, as Yusuf’s hopes are quickly dashed for work and he spends his days wandering the streets. Even though Yusuf has work as a photographer, and sees himself as more cultured and together than his distant relative, there are parallels across their loneliness and their propensity to both look rather than act.
Ultimately it’s a film about loneliness, from a male perspective, and yet understanding how class and social status influence that loneliness. Distant is slowly funny in deadpan ways, and also melancholy in the observation of characters who cannot connect or express their desires. Shout out to Kenta McGrath for writing about this film for a past issue of VHS Tracking and putting it on my radar. Watched the blu-ray released by Big World Pictures.
VHS Tracking 