Three Monkeys (2008)

Turkish photographer and director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's fifth feature film which he co-wrote with Turkish photographer Ebru Ceylan and Turkish screenwriter Ercan Kesal, co-produced and co-edited, premiered In competition at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival in 2008, was shot on locations in Turkey and is a Turkey-France-Italy co-production which was produced by producer Zeynep Ozbatur Atakan. It tells the story about a middle-aged man named Eyüp who lives in a house by the ocean in Turkey with his wife Hacer and son Ismail whom is about to graduate. After being offered a large amount of money by a politician named Servet who has gotten himself involved in a hit-and-run car accident and is preparing for an upcoming election, Eyüp agrees to confess to the crime, but whilst he is serving time in prison his family changes.Distinctly and precisely directed by Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, this rhythmic fictional tale which is narrated from multiple viewpoints, draws a throughout intriguing and reflective portrayal of a father who hears no evil, a mother who speaks no evil and a son who sees no evil. While notable for it's distinct milieu depictions, sterling production design by art director Ebru Ceylan, cinematography by Turkish cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki and brilliant use of sound and colors, this character-driven and narrative-driven parable from the late 2000s depicts three interrelated studies of character.This acute examination of human behavior where the distance between three family members is increased as much by what they choose to do as what they choose not to do, is impelled and reinforced by it's cogent narrative structure, subtle character development, quiet characters, sparse dialog, tragicomic song and the fine acting performances by Turkish actors Yavuz Bingöl, Ahmet Rifat Sungar, Ercan Kesal and actress Hatice Aslan. A cinematographic, atmospheric and poignant drama which gained, among numerous other awards, the award for Best Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan at the 61st Cannes Film Festival in 2008.

What makes an art-house film? Well, sometimes you watch a mainstream movie and it's nicely paced, smartly scripted, easy on the eye, but altogether, it's just too slick to get far beneath the skin. But sometimes, a director has a real vision of his movie, a sense of how to make his scenes count beyond the normal cinematic vocabulary; and it's these films that tend to linger longest in the mind. And Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film 'Three Monkeys' might seem to be one of the latter kind: certainly, he has clearly thought very hard about how to compose every shot in this movie. Unfortunately, his choices are, when taken as a whole, rather perverse: when almost every scene is shot from a static camera, either too close or too distant for us to see what we might be used to seeing in movies (faces, for example), the impact of an individual choice of shot is lessened; but the sense of disengagement from the audience heightened. The minimal dialogue, and all-round feeling of ennui, didn't help either: there's a plot here, and even some moments of supposedly high tension, but it's all drowned in a mood of intense but lethargic miserablism. By the end, I had lost both interest in and the details of the story. And I'm a miserablist myself, as a rule. If you like blockbusters, you'll certainly get no change from this movie.

I agree with most of the commenters' praise of the cinematography and the art direction. Nuri Bilge Ceylan also makes great use of the weather to express a mood. In his "Distant" the snowstorm was almost the main character and here thunderstorms make several portentous appearances. But the main reason to see this film is the enigmatic performance of the lovely and sexy Hatice Aslan as the lonely wife, Hacer. Her expressive face lingers long after the curtain falls.But I would quarrel with the turn the plot takes half way through the movie. I can understand Hacer's having a fling with Servet, the feckless politician for whom her husband is taking the rap. She is lonely and was probably under-appreciated by her husband even before he went to jail, thus making her vulnerable to Servet's attentions. Not to mention, she wanted to secure the money to try to revive her slacker son. But to then have her become insanely obsessed with Servet stretches credulity—-especially with her husband's imminent return. It would have been far more believable IMHO for Servet to become obsessed with Hacer. Then the plot could have unfolded in a climactic way when her husband returned. In fact it could have ended almost the same way. But that would have been my movie and not Mr. Ceylan's

I can't remember if I've ever seen a Turkish film before, which is a pity, because if Three Monkeys is anything to go by, I have missed some terrific movies.This is a dark, stylish, noir thriller which sees a man agreeing to take the rap for his political master who is involved in a car accident. In return for doing time for a crime he did not commit, his boss will continue to pay his salary to his family, and also settle the 'debt' with a lump sum payment when the man is eventually released. While he is in prison, his wife is left to hold the family together and she and her son quickly get caught up in a web of passion and betrayal.Director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan carried off the Best Director Award at Cannes for this, his fifth feature, and it's not hard to see why.Three Monkeys is is a dark, brooding film, where every shot has been thought through and framed with meticulous detail. Long, intense close ups of the principal characters produces sustained psychological tension as unspoken words seem to fly through the air like knives.The principal cast of Three Monkeys; Yavuz Bingöl, Hatice Aslan, Ahmat Rifal Sungar, and Ercan Kesal, are universally good, but top credits should go to Hatice Aslan, the femme fatale of the piece, who has the ability to convey many layers of meaning by saying little and feeling much.Highly recommended.