Three Monkeys (2008) ****
How much would you sacrifice for the people around you? What can you ignore to keep your family together? If you pretend something didn't happen, does it matter that it ever happened in the first place? These are some of the questions that permeate the great Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest film, Three Monkeys.
Three Monkey's is a grim affair. The film opens as a man drives his car, nodding off, and hits a pedestrian. He's a politician, and knowing what this would do to his career with an upcoming election, he phones his longtime driver in the middle of the night and offers him an proposition. Take his place, and the nine month jail sentence in return for a lump sum. He accepts for the sake of his boss. Never mind that his sacrifice is placed somewhat in vain, considering the politician loses the election anyway.
While in jail, the man's family deals on their own. His son, Ismail, wants to ask the politician for an advance so they can buy a car. He can do work with the car, but the work is for shady characters according to his mother. He takes the train to visit his father every so often in jail. The mother works in a kitchen and looks to get her son a job that he would never be interested in anyway. She does eventually go to the politician on her son's behalf, it appears, to get an advance. There's a strange tension between the two. He asks her if her husband knows about "this." Does he refer to getting the advance, which the father would never approve of, or is it something else? One day Ismail gets set to take the train to visit his father, and mother is preparing to attend training for work. At the station, Ismail gets sick, and vomits on himself. He returns home to get changed. After a moment he realizes the house is not empty. There's noise coming from the bedroom. He notices cigarettes, and looks through the keyhole in the door. He turns and leaves. His mother is having an affair with the politician we now know, as does he. He waits until he leaves then returns to the house. He confronts his mother, but never admits that he saw them together, just that he knows he was in the house. This is the first in a series of events which are purposely left unspoken. He does return to visit his father, and suspicious, he asks if they have someone new. After a pause, the son replies no. To admit the truth would mean the destruction of the family.
When the father gets out of jail, he returns home to an emotionally absent wife. We can't really know if she was this way before he left, but it doesn't really matter now. She meets him in a nighty laying on the bed, in a brilliant scene which sees the husband go from loving, to suspicious, to anger, and near misogyny, to desperation. The wife, too, goes through a range of emotions, and at one point seems genuine but for a moment, then falls back into a distant place. Everyone knows what is happening, but no one dares speak it.
Things spiral more and more into an abyss, until everything has to be at least acknowledged. There are ominous tones throughout Three Monkeys, and they climax in a crucial scene, edited in a particular manner. It involves a meeting between two people in a long take, shot from a distance, that finally cuts to another shot from a distance, but this time from a slightly different angle, and slightly obscured by objects in the foreground. What comes next will require a crucial decision be made by the Father to keep his family together, or maybe there is another way.
The family had another son who died. We're lead to believe that he drowned from the oft sounds of dripping water, and his appearance in a few surreal scenes involving the son and the father - the boy's body is soaked as he observes his family members lying in bed. These moments have a creepiness, but a sad tenderness. Particularly in one scene as the Father lies in bed, his wife moving in the background. All of a sudden a tiny arm comes up from behind and embraces him. This family must have been a bomb waiting to explode for a long time. They're bleeding pain, but each other is all they have.
Three Monkey's is about as well a film can be directed. Indeed, Ceylan won the best director prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The aforementioned scene is just one of many well constructed moments. Ceylan channels Tarkovsky in a few scenes, and his colour palette in particular is reminiscent of Tarkovsky. It's only suitable that a film of such dark subject matter be matched in it's look. Ceylan makes great use of locations, and particularly sounds. After the crucial event in the film, the mother wears a shirt that was certainly chosen for it's pattern, as perhaps a not so subtle accusation. Shots are brilliantly composed to represent the distance felt. That there seems to be only one tender embrace in the film - by the dead son to his father - is profound in retrospect.
I can't be sure, but I have a feeling that Ceylan drew from somewhere deep inside for this film. It's a film that seems as if it were made by someone who knows all to well how something feels. These kinds of movies are almost never a treat to watch. Luckily Ceylan is a such a good director that things never become unbearable, even when they're at the darkest. It's a dark and painful film, but nevertheless doesn't refuse hold out hope for a better day. They were a whole once. Maybe they can be again.
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