A self-indulgent art movie about the break-up of a marriage written and directed by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan in which he stars as the husband and his real-life wife Ebru Ceylan appears as the wife who leaves him. Is it therapy or a home-movie for the art house crowd? Or is it an incisive analysis of the things that divide men and women and of how love can come to an end? It improves in the memory if you can divorce yourself from the incestuous feeling that it's just a bit too much like self-abuse and it's certainly bleak enough not to be likable. Likability isn't something Ceylan aspires to. Whether he is 'acting' or playing 'himself' he comes across as a crass egocentric bore; your sympathies lie with the wife, (though initially she, too, seems something of a harridan, her actions at best irrational if not vindicative).
The separation occurs reasonably early in the film and then we spend too much time with the self-pitying husband as he tries to figure out his wife's actions. In the meantime he is not above a bit of screwing around himself, cuckolding an old friend. This is a warts-and-all portrait of a marriage, as rough as Strindberg or Albee, and yet it still feels like a vanity project. Woody Allen's movies may be shamelessly autobiographical, certainly in their milieu if not precisely in the literal sense, but Allen is a comic genius who can find humour and absurdity in even the most painful of situations. I worry when a film-maker chooses a subject as obviously close to his heart as this one and then films it with himself as the central character as if it was an observation of 'real life'.
On a technical level it is quite masterly with Gokhan Tiryaki's camera luminously observing, often in extreme close-up, the slow and painful death of this relationship and in locations that are far from attractive. This is the first of Ceylan's films that I have seen and their is no doubting his virtuosity. I just wish he had put it to better purpose.
The separation occurs reasonably early in the film and then we spend too much time with the self-pitying husband as he tries to figure out his wife's actions. In the meantime he is not above a bit of screwing around himself, cuckolding an old friend. This is a warts-and-all portrait of a marriage, as rough as Strindberg or Albee, and yet it still feels like a vanity project. Woody Allen's movies may be shamelessly autobiographical, certainly in their milieu if not precisely in the literal sense, but Allen is a comic genius who can find humour and absurdity in even the most painful of situations. I worry when a film-maker chooses a subject as obviously close to his heart as this one and then films it with himself as the central character as if it was an observation of 'real life'.
On a technical level it is quite masterly with Gokhan Tiryaki's camera luminously observing, often in extreme close-up, the slow and painful death of this relationship and in locations that are far from attractive. This is the first of Ceylan's films that I have seen and their is no doubting his virtuosity. I just wish he had put it to better purpose.