Ray Pride

Turkish writer-producer-director-cinematographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2002 Cannes-prize-winning "Distant" (Uzak) is a memorably intimate exploration of closed-off personalities, quietly fashioned after the obsessive, intimate style of Bergman and Tarkovsky. Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir, a nonactor and friend of Ceylan's) plays a 40-year-old Istanbul photographer who's left his home village behind, and a marriage, too. He works commercial jobs, whiles his days watching Tarkovsky's "Stalker" or girl-on-girl porn, brooding in smoky cafes, having impersonal affairs. Enter Yusuf (the late Emin Toprak), a younger, angry relative from the village (and an actual relative of the director). Ceylan takes Kiarostami's use of non-actors and actual settings a little farther by using his own apartment, his own car, his own view of his Istanbul, for the main characters'. The plot, such as there is, is a slow burn. It perambulates rather than deciphers, ambles instead of defining. There's much use of filters, stately widescreen compositions and rich, telling sound design. It is very sad but also very beautiful. (Particularly after snow flocks the gray-on-gray city.) There is one breathtaking moment, a scene involving a beached tanker in snow, that is merely the best of dozens of memorable fragments. 110m.

"Distant" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2004-04-09)

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