Ceylan’s meta-filmic sophomore feature feels like a Kiarostami-esque attempt at self-reflexivity, while occasionally drifting into dreamy, subliminal scenes, as a filmmaker broaches the idea of getting his parents to act in his next project.
Review #3,047
Dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
1999 | Turkey | Drama | 118min | 1.85:1 | Turkish
PG (passed clean)
Cast: Mehmet Emin Ceylan, Muzaffer Özdemir, Fatma Ceylan, Mehmet Emin Toprak, Muhammed Zımbaoğlu
Plot: An aspiring filmmaker visits his parents and begins to devise a movie. Amidst creating and casting for the film, he encounters family and friends who struggle with their own problems, dreams and life.
Awards: Nom. for Golden Bear (Berlinale)
International Sales: NBC Film
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Filmmaking; Hometown; Parents & Children; Mortality
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slow
Audience Type: Arthouse
Viewed: Screener
Spoilers: No
This sophomore feature from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, regarded by many to be Turkey’s greatest contemporary director, further sharpens his focus on provincial life, family relationships, and the passing of time.
Adding to all that is also Ceylan’s somewhat Kiarostami-esque attempt at self-reflexivity, as he makes apparent the act of filming as a mode for poetic expression (rather than for commercial intent).
In fact, an old man laments in the film: “He never does work that brings money”, a pointed remark on his son’s filmmaking exploits, when the latter broaches the idea of getting his parents to act in his next project.
It is not a surprise, then, that Ceylan would use his real Dad and Mom as the basis for Clouds of May. It is this trope of ‘parent and child’, mediated by the ‘real and reel’, that undergirds this realist meta-film, which occasionally drifts into dreamy, subliminal scenes that conflate time and memory.
There are certainly shades of Tarkovsky in this respect, and also evident in Ceylan’s breathtaking capture of nature and the countryside (he was the DP here).
“Time goes by so fast. We’re growing old.”
There’s something about his way with wind, trees, open fields, and lone vehicles on winding roads that anticipates his later, much more complex and thematically dense masterpieces such as Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014).
It’s less verbose here, but his curiosity about life as it exists on the fringes of society and social interactions (notice the wonderful scene of a boy summoned by a woman to deliver a basket of fruit up a hill), as well as the edges of the camera frame, builds up cumulatively, so much so that a simple object like an egg, which that same boy keeps in his pocket as a test of personal responsibility (he mustn’t break it for forty consecutive days), becomes a marker of impermanence and deception.
Speaking of markers, one of the subplots of Clouds of May centers on the father’s anxiety over the prospect of government officials coming to his farm to ‘mark’ trees for deforestation, assumedly for land development.
Ceylan invites a political reading about unsolicited authority and control over personal possessions of nature, but Clouds of May is compassionate enough to suggest that there is a time and place for everything, with legal recourse (like filmmaking) operating similarly between the realms of reality and the imaginary.
Grade: A-
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Eternality Tan 