Cinema World Tour, Film #34
Country: Turkey
Watched in: Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
Rating: 8/10
196 minutes of slow-paced dialogue around five main characters in a remote place in turkey. Sounds boring, but the opposite is true. The 2014 Palme d'Or Winner Winter Sleep is a film one has to experience. Words can barely describe what makes this film so special. One of the reasons is undoubtedly the absolutely FANTASTIC screenplay, though. This is easily one of the most well-written scripts ever, easily comparable with Sorkin's The Social Network. The second and third hour of this turkish film consist almost completely of 20+ minutes long dialogues, reflecting on philosophy, consciousness, morals, psychology and many more topics. There is almost no music, the whole film is carried by the terrific actors ensemble and the screenplay. The dialogue scenes are truly long, and they do sometimes feel too written – as if this was a theatre play. But every time this thought could come to your mind, N. B. Ceylan is clever enough to reflect his own screenplay, by admitting in the dialogue itself: "this sounds dull and empty“, "you sound as if you're still on stage“, "I don't believe your fine words“. The result is that this film digs so deep into the very complex characters that you'll have difficulties to judge any of them. Nobody in this film is good or bad, nobody acts in a way you wouldn't at least understand. The character depth of that film is absolutely stunning and makes the whole work enthralling and incredibly interesting. The audience is permanently confronted with questions like "What would you do in this situation?" and "What do you think of that character's behavior? What would you do instead?".
Winter Sleep is nothing less than possibly the best character study of the last years, a film which absolutely deserves the Palme d'Or. The only thing is that for a remarkable running time of 196 minutes, the story is neither interesting enough, nor is it emotionally very engaging. A similar, but much better film is Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea - which doesn't mean that Winter Sleep isn't as well fantastic. It's just not a masterpiece, and as much one will be amazed how understandable and deep the presented characters are, the question remains if it was really necessary to stretch this on over 3 hours.
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