Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s new offering opens with a snow-covered landscape. We see a man get off a white minibus and head, on foot, toward the proverbial village we know from the Turkish song, "There is a village out there, that village is our village, even if we never go and visit it." While some may sing this song meaning every word of it, for some, like our hero and narrator Samet, not going to the village is not an option. He is a state-trained arts teacher and has to teach "out there somewhere" for his civil services scores.
The urban teacher coming to the heart of Anatolia is a story as old as the snow-covered hills of Erzurum where the story is set. Ceylan has always circled around this subject, bringing his urban characters to the countryside and having them confront local bigotries, as, famously, in his "Winter Sleep." In this one Ceylan has gone for the very thing itself, the "Western" teacher trying to import civilization to the east of the country. Sadly, he even has our hero talk about "civilization," one of the many moments in the film where Ceylan decides to tell rather than show; or rather, where he builds up a message through great camera work and great acting, only to spoil it with one of the actors spelling out what the message was – presumably for the ones at the back.
Before we are introduced to the tensions at work, we see Samet interact with different people in the village, the veterinary who always has booze to share, the young misfit who is always threatening to go join terrorists up in the mountains, and the local gendarmerie whose main job seems to be conducting searches at the village cafe. When we make it to the school, we see that for this film Ceylan has chosen a topic that should, but does not so far seem to, divide audiences. We see him interact with one of his female students, give her a gift, and then her giggling and stroking his back as they walk in the school corridor.
This immediately reminds me of Mads Mikkelsen’s "The Hunt," where Mikkelsen’s character is accused of harassing a student much younger than the one in Ceylan’s film. The actor playing Samet is no Mads Mikkelsen, as his character does not have an iota of confidence. He is arguably the most irritating character in the film altogether: If not inviting the advances of his student Sevim, savoring her attachment to him, not once checking his privilege and pulling rank – "You will all be cultivating potatoes and doing nothing with your lives soon enough!"– the minute his patience is tested. His toxicity reaches its peak when he refuses to give Sevim back a memento that has been confiscated from her during a school search.
Student harassment is a risky topic to handle, and so, like in Mikkelsen’s "The Hunt," Ceylan has to introduce a character to whom our hero’s romantic and sexual energies are directed, to prove he has no evil designs for Sevim. For this purpose enters Nuray, played by Merve Dizdar, whose portrayal of the fated heroine won her a much-deserved Cannes award. Samet has had enough of the civilizing mission and is about to ask for a transfer, which means he does not want to get involved with anyone local. So when friends try to set him up with Nuray who lives in the town, he introduces her to his flatmate Kenan instead, who, in turn, takes a real shine towards her. As per the film and life plot device, discovering that she is desirable to other men immediately makes her more desirable to him too.
To divert attention from what Samet’s intentions toward his student Sevim may or may not be, we get to know Nuray better. She is an activist, indeed a sometime member of the "organization." She has lost her leg during an "explosion," which makes an oblique reference to a suicide bombing during a protest in Ankara. Although reluctant at first, Nuray gets to be friends with both Samet and Kenan, finally inviting both to dinner at her family’s home while the family is away. Samet’s toxicity is at work again when he manages to leave Kenan in the dark about the dinner date and goes to Nuray’s flat alone. While on the surface this may look like a "romantic" ploy, I doubt if any woman in the audience did not feel a terrible sense of déjà vu, where they are left alone with a man, while the plan was to have a group meet up.
Nuray finds that one way to deal with this unwanted tete-a-tete situation is to get Samet to talk about his "liberal" and empty politics, and we are treated to one of Ceylan’s tedious scenes of talking heads. In the end, though, Nuray decides to take what fate has brought her way, reminding us that women operate on a different sense of time: "We could draw this out and waste time, or we could prevent any wastage of time right now," she says. It is a bit of a letdown to see she has capitulated to Samet’s advances so easily but then when she invites him to her bedroom, she asks him to turn off the lights in the living room as it is "too bright." One could read it as her not being confident of her disfigured body, but the way Dizdar masterfully plays it, it comes across as her not being quite happy with the option she has been given.
Although Dizdar has already done all this work, Ceylan insists on revealing why she did what she did that evening. In a later scene in the film, Nuray feels the need to confront both Samet and Kenan about the evening – drives alone from the town to the village at night in fact – because Samet tells Kenan what happened, although she has explicitly asked him not to, in case you were still wondering if Samet was toxic or not. I am not a fan of Ceylan’s "tell even if you have already shown" tactics, but when Nuray says that she spent the night with Samet because as a woman who is now seen as somehow "lacking," she needs to establish who she is and what she is capable of as a woman in this battle of the sexes, I feel the moment is earned. It is the most touching moment of the film, and having said her piece she attempts to leave, but the snow will not let her. We see her in the car, with the two men, trying to make their way to the town as the snow hits the windscreen in the dark, almost the same scene her previous film appearance in "Snow and the Bear." All I ask of the film industry is please let Merve play in the sun next time you cast her.
Unfortunately, rather than end the 3 hour 20 minute film there, Ceylan insists on returning the story to Samet, to his experience of the "East" and some super cliche Orientalist narrative of finding yourself. He wishes agency and freedom for Sevim, the camera lingering on her face as snowflakes keep falling on her lashes. We really did not need this last bit of objectification of the "eastern woman" a-la-Aziyade, but there is no stopping Mr. Ceylan. Has he, hopefully, finally exhausted the urbanite loses/finds self in the provinces theme? There is a short, very strategic breaking of the fourth wall sequence in the film, and I genuinely hope this is where his cinema is going next.
