Let me be honest. I can't think of a single reason for you to sit through a Turkish movie. Not disrespect to the people of this gorgeous country I visited last year, but we're so different that we're so fundamentally different that our respective sources of entertainment will always sound fucking silly to one another. WINTER SLEEP is a two hundred minutes Turkish movie that won the Palme D'Or in Cannes Film Festival last year and I can't think of anybody who would willingly walked into this movie without A) Being Turkish B) Having traveled to Turkey once in their lives or C) Being a crazy person. Hidden under thick layers of intellectualism and Turkish culture is a powerful movie that illustrates the social gap between the wealthy and the dispossessed in a way I hadn't quite experience before. WINTER SLEEP will make you fight for every minute, but it's actually an engaging work of art.
Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) used to be a stage actor before retiring in rural Cappadocia, where he now runs a hotel with his estranged wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen) and his sister Necla (Demet Akbag). He made a small fortune with real estate he is now renting all over the region. A couple weeks before winter, a young boy (Emirhan Doruktutan) breaks the window of his car with a rock, triggering a series of events that'll expose the unhealthy nature of his relationship to his tenants and that'll pit his wife and his sister against him. As winter falls over Cappadocia, the hotel, once Aydin' shelter against the reality of his region, turns into a toxic, confrontational lockdown from which he cannot escape unless he steps down from his pedestal and faces the life he's been desperately trying to run away from.
WINTER SLEEP is based on a short story by Anton Checkhov. It might seem like a useless bit of information, but I assure you it's not. The film is pretty darn Checkov-ian, in its theme and its structure. There are multiple long dialogue scenes, battle of wits between irreconcilable realities. It can get pretty dense and you really have to buy into the characters if you want to survive the first hour. If you do (obviously, I did), the depth and the complexity of WINTER SLEEP is going to win you over. I'm aware there is such thing as psychology of wealth, but I hadn't seen it exposed so thoroughly in fiction before. It's not a movie that'll offer you any catharsis whatsoever, but more of a layered, detailed painting of the relationship between the powerful and the powerless, and the brutal nature of capitalist exploitation.
It's a long movie. It's APOCALYPSE NOW: REDUX-long. I can already hear you asking yourself if you have the fortitude to sit through two hundred minutes of Chekhovian action located in central Turkey. Honestly, it's a valid question and I was afraid I wouldn't last, too. WINTER SLEEP is all about pacing. Once your relationship to Aydin's bitter, cynical self-centeredness develops, you'll be going from one confrontation to the other, hoping the next interlocutor nails him to the fucking wall. Haluk Bilginer's spellbinding performance really is the motor that drives this movie forward. In one scene, Aydin is listening to Nihal's grievances over their relationship, saying nothing and smiling coyly, his face lit by the fireplace. He looks like the freakin' devil. WINTER SLEEP finds its groove once the viewer starts hating Aydin and Bilginer does a terrific job at selling this idea to you.
WINTER SLEEP is so dense, it's a little bit of a chore to watch, but it is loved. It's art, not a mass entertainment product meant to shave two hours off your life. It takes a courageous stance on the very pertinent, contemporary issue of relationship between the owners and the owned. It might be dressed in the timeless, otherworldly setting of Cappadocia, but the themes of WINTER SLEEP could've been written by John Cheever and exploited in rural New Hampshire. What I mean by that is that it's universal, it has purpose and it has a beating heart. WINTER SLEEP might be a tough nut to crack, but it has more to offer than most movies out there. It's also visually gorgeous, but I figured you knew that already. If you like to work for your entertainment, WINTER SLEEP is a dense, patient and yet ultimately rewarding movie. There you go, I found a good reason for you to watch a Turkish movie. Films like this are few and far between.
Cappadocia is beautiful. If you didn't know prior to watching WINTER SLEEP, then you'll know.
WINTER SLEEP is so dense, it's a little bit of a chore to watch, but it is loved. It's art, not a mass entertainment product meant to shave two hours off your life. It takes a courageous stance on the very pertinent, contemporary issue of relationship between the owners and the owned. It might be dressed in the timeless, otherworldly setting of Cappadocia, but the themes of WINTER SLEEP could've been written by John Cheever and exploited in rural New Hampshire. What I mean by that is that it's universal, it has purpose and it has a beating heart. WINTER SLEEP might be a tough nut to crack, but it has more to offer than most movies out there. It's also visually gorgeous, but I figured you knew that already. If you like to work for your entertainment, WINTER SLEEP is a dense, patient and yet ultimately rewarding movie. There you go, I found a good reason for you to watch a Turkish movie. Films like this are few and far between.