Uzak (Distant)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
London Film Festival 2003

Toby Marshall

Distant is a detached, slow moving and sporadically compelling examination of rural and urban identities in contemporary Turkey.

It opens with an extreme long shot. In the distance a man is trudging across a barren snow-covered valley. Following redundancies at the village factory, Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) is heading for Istabul, hoping to find work to support his family. He's planning to stay with his older cousin, a successful commercial photographer.

On arrival he finds that Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) is welcoming, but the situation soon sours when Yusuf fails to find work at the docks. Prissy Mahmut resents Yusuf's slightly oafish presence in his tidy bachelor flat, especially the smell of his shoes. He is also concerned that Yusuf does not appear to have an exit strategy.

Ceylan's two characters provide a negative commentary on the psychological impact of urbanisation. Country boy Yusuf is an optimistic, naïve and sociable young man, who is principally motivated by the desire to alleviate the difficulties faced by his poverty-stricken mother. By contrast, the older and more metropolitan Yusuf is jaded and suspicious. During the film it is shown that he has lost the photographic aspirations of his youth - he once wanted to be the photographic equivalent of the Russian director Tarkovsky - and that he has scant concern for the feelings of others, particularly his family.

In the final scenes Mahmut needlessly humiliates his cousin and fails to communicate his submerged feelings to his ex-wife, who leaves the country with her new husband. Appropriately the film concludes with a shot of Mahmut sitting on a bench in Istanbul. He's staring blankly into space, an isolated figure in a city of millions.